I’m not sure what your point in bringing it up is either. The point is that the bailouts were fully recovered, and that is undisputed. HN loves its pedantry, but there is little value to this particular incarnation of it.

I'm not saying banks are evil but they do have it easy because they are core infrastructure that people don't want to live without.

I’d expand this... It’s easy to make a profit when everyone is strapped for cash.

Taxpayers should have behaved like hedge funds behave with one another...merciless. Want cash cause no one else loans to you? Sure, hand 95% of the business. The difference between what I said and $15.3 Billion is the gift.

It turns out that the architects of this bailout were very smart about the way they did it. Also, relative to the recent stimulus packages that have no hope of ever being recovered, the numbers from 2008 are quaint and the conditions under which it was given were extremely fiscally responsible.

Nah. Keep the management, they run the business not owners. In fact give them raises and bonuses. It's not like managers had other employment options.

But either way, they did get a lifesaving bailout, regardless of the merits or whether US got their money back

They did, and given the systemic importance of the companies that received this money, that was a gift not only to the companies, but to the entire economy. We wouldn’t have an economy today had they not done this. Today we are capable of giving away trillions with no hope of recovery in part because of what was done in 2008 - and it was done at no cost to taxpayers.

The point is that the outcome would not have been the same, because investors would not have treated the companies the same.