And taxpayers have so far realized a $22 billion positive return on their investment in banks.
I never said that every single bank repaid every single dollar.
My qualification for “repayment” is that the net:net, ie, that which we’d use in business.
And that is seen to still be negative, per the spreadsheet on the report’s page 3 (not that which you refer to as page 3, which is the third page in the .pdf file).
At the bottom of the spreadsheet, we see that we have $386.77 billion in cash back for $417.55 billion disbursed. ie, We’re still cash negative on the TARP program.
The clowns in DC who claim that we’ve recovered $X billion on our ‘investment in banks’ are playing a sleight-of-hand game here. It’s like some investor saying “Well, in the last three years, I’ve made huge gains on AAPL...” while said investor has been taking a bath on (insert name of industry here), but he’s not taken his losses yet.
To me, the TARP program was a failure in that it prevented capitalism from actually working - punishing the stupid with failure and causing capital to be re-allocated to people who don’t have their head up their posteriors. This failure is going to come back to bite us again... sooner rather than later.