There is a good reason for that. If they only gave to banks in need, giving tells people that that bank is in trouble. And nobody would do business with the o

There is a good reason for that. If they only gave to banks in need, giving tells people that that bank is in trouble. And nobody would do business with the ones identified which guarantees that they are in trouble. But they lent to everyone, and every bank knew that every other bank was good. Which meant that they all did business with each other. However the eye-popping sums were misleading since these were short term loans. In fact that USA officially made $15.3 billion in profit off of TARP. (Which was about breakeven if you consider inflation.) There are also many sets of numbers going around. For example TARP originally was supposed to be $700 billion, but only $475 billion was authorized, we spent $426.4 billion and got $441.7 billion back. The $15.3 billion profit that we made is very close to break-even when you consider inflation.