It is annoying that this is currently grey despite being entirely correct for the US. The banking rescue worked. A few crimes did get swept under the rug, like "robo-signing", but those weren't directly linked to TARP.

Other countries did less well out of the event. The UK still owns the emergency nationalised RBS. AIB blew up Ireland quite badly; Kaupthing even worse for Iceland, and so on down to Cyprus where the depositors were deemed to "dirty money" to get a bailout and actually took losses.

I also don't think people have considered what the alternative society of "contagion" would have looked like, where enough banks had failed that a significant fraction of companies could not make payroll and millions of Americans suddenly could not buy anything.