I still maintain that it's not terribly clear what choice we had at the time. Wall Street was melting down. People forget that. The same way they forget how bad things were at the beginning of last year, and thus why we needed a stimulus package. From the NYT:
Mr. Geithner told a watchdog panel that banks had repaid about 75 percent of the bailout money they received, and the government’s investments in those banks had brought taxpayers $21 billion.
The oversight panel was created by Congress to oversee the Treasury Department’s $700 billion financial bailout program, created at the height of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. The panel has been critical of the program, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
TARP “has helped restore financial stability at a much lower cost than anticipated,” Mr. Geithner said in his testimony. “We have already recovered more than half of total disbursements under the program. And TARP investments have generated $24 billion in additional revenue for taxpayers.”
