This is thoroughly wrong.

Government does not invest a limited pot of money like 'savings', it conjures up money out of nowhere and can deploy ulimited amount of capital. The only limit on this activity is literally breaking the economy, causing inflation, etc,

If you propose we dump that money in education, well, we should, but it does not mean we should not bail out the banks - these two problems do not compete for same resources.

Sure. The GGP tried to say the bailout was an investment with profits though. It's not as simple as "They got low returns so it was a bad investment", but it's also not as simple as "They got returns so it was a good because it was an investment."

Even if you accept the amazing, faulty premise inherent in this comment (see the other response for more on why one shouldn't), the timeline is misleading.

For example, TARP (about $475bn) was more than 93% recovered by the end of 2012. The bank-related programs had already over-recovered $23bn versus the $245bn disbursement by that point with approximately a 4% internal rate of return.

Not to mention the inflation rate between 2008 and 2010 was -4% and then 0% for a hot minute thereafter. Factoring that, plus the 4% nominal return, meant that the programs yielded something like 8-10% annualized real returns.

Not if you consider that the return was a nice side effect of also not crashing the world economy. Not every "investment" is just about making money, this one just had the nice side effect of not costing it as well.