Senator Sanders is out with a line that the banks got a trillion dollar bail out and nobody went to jail for the rescue of the American banking system and with that the economies of other countries…
Sanders wants us to forget the dire situation during that time …
He wants us to forget how a collapse of the banks would have hurt not just the rich….
But EVERYBODY….
The banks that Sanders is attacking where NOT just the Big ones….
But included state and local banks and those investors who had their pension money at stake….
I’m a Democrat but I really have no use for Sanders who is on a crusade that I can’t afford…
And doesn’t know how to count…..
But did Wall Street get a $1 trillion bailout? That’s a nice round number for rhetorical purposes, but it’s not borne out by the facts.
The core of the financial bailout was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which Congress passed in 2008 and was run by the Treasury Department. The limit for aid was originally set at $700 billion, but Congress in 2010 reduced it to $475 billion.
ProPublica maintains a great tracker on TARP spending, and it shows that banks and other financial institutions received $245 billion, mostly to replenish capital. But many of those banks are not what one would consider “Wall Street.” Many community banks and credit unions also received TARP funds.
Looking just at the big Wall Street banks, we count $135 billion: Citigroup ($45 billion), Bank of America ($45 billion), JP Morgan Chase ($25 billion), Goldman Sachs ($10 billion) and Morgan Stanley ($10 billion).
But we can take a more expansive definition and say every bank counts as Wall Street. So that’s $245 billion. We can also include the U.S. government takeover of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($191 billion), which help keep the housing market functioning. We could also add the U.S. government’s purchase of much of American International Group ($67.8 billion), an insurance company central to many financial transactions, such as credit default swaps.
That adds up to just over $500 billion — or half a trillion.
But this is an expansive definition. The Congressional Budget Office, in a 2015 report, says support for financial institutions added up to $313 billion. So that’s less than one-third of $1 trillion.
TARP, after all, was not just for big banks. The automobile industry received nearly $80 billion. Adding in every possible loan and investment, including to automakers, gets you to about $632 billion, according to ProPublica.
That’s still not $1 trillion.
It’s worth remembering that while financial institutions were bailed out, so were the American people. If these banks and other financial institutions had collapsed, many companies would have soon followed, leading to massive layoffs. The collapse of AIG would have had global impact. Moreover, in the case of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, shareholders were basically wiped out when the government took them over, so it’s not as if the owners of all of the companies that received TARP funds or other government aid were “bailed out.”
Moreover, the U.S. government was eventually repaid for the loans by many of the recipients and ended up earning, as of Feb. 25, a profit of more than $100 billion through dividends, interest and so forth, according to ProPublica….
image….CNN.Com