Name:   MartiniMan - Subject:   Just The Facts Date:   2/8/2014 8:33:09 AM

That is an interesting list, especially seeing which bailout recipients defaulted on all or a portion of the money they received. Wasn't the bailout proposed by the Bush administration and approved in a bipartisan way by Congress?  Would love to see a similar list of how the Porkulus was spent but for some reason I doubt there are any journalists in the govt media that want that information out.....I know Dems would not.

I opposed the bailout for two reasons. One, by not making these banks suffer the consequences of their poor decisions it creates a moral hazard for them to do so again.  After all, the govt will bail them out so what the heck.  Two, anything that govt does in haste or in the midst of a crisis is likely to incur all sorts of fraud.  Looking at the number of lenders that didn't pay back the money they were given sure proves that theory.  And its also not surprising that the two biggest recipients are Fannie and Freddie and neither have even paid back what they were given.  But they have lots of company in that regard.

One thing I can tell you with 100% certainty is if I ran an investment fund that had almost $700B in it in 2008 and I only returned a profit of $12B I would be hit with a multitude of shareholder lawsuits and rightly so.  But for all that, there were plenty of reasoned arguments for the Bush administration to believe the bailout was necessary to avoid a more serious economic problem and enough members of Congress were convinced as well. We will never know what would have happened had it not been done but the fact that almost half the money was simply returned tells me that it was way overblown. I recall clearly all the stories of banks being forced to take the money even though they didn't want it or need it because the strings it came with were unacceptable to them.