The actual story, not this article, is that a scumbag (Greenberg) is suing the government over the illegal actions of other scumbags (Geithner, Paulson, Bernanke). This is not about "you didn't bail us out enough." This is about Greenberg trying to weasel his way into winning a bullshit claim that's only viable because the Fed and Treasury acted well outside the scope of their mandate. They were trying to launder money through AIG in order to prop up the investment banks, especially Goldman. The bad news for all of us is that Greenberg and his legal team are smart enough to see that their move was illegal.

Again, this isn't good vs. evil. It is scumbag vs. scumbag.

Frankly I'm fine with that, but we should be up-front about what it was.

The shakedown was on the government side, for the most part. They forced AIG to take a terrible deal to hide the fact that Goldman was insolvent. If they hadn't been able to launder money through AIG to cover the bets Goldman and other had made on the MBS market, it would have been much harder to lie about Goldman being eligible under the Bank Holding Company Act and thus eligible for the Fed's discount window. There would have been knock-on effects that would have made the crisis much harder to contain. It also would have completely screwed the bad actors in addition to the damage done to the rest of us.

As for TARP making money, that's debatable. I've seen plenty of arguments that point out that TARP repayments are often calculated without reference to inflation or whether the government could have put that money to a different use. TARP wasn't a shakedown, but a panicked, though deliberate, choice to make sure rich people felt as little sting as possible. The tools to actually resolve the crisis were mostly in place, at least for commercial banks, but the political class decided it was wiser to absolve the financial sector of the burden of having to recognize the losses they had earned.

Financial institutions just love being regulated.

TARP was, first and foremost, a big shakedown of Wall Street by the Federal Reserve. Lots of banks wanted to refuse it, but they were required (the legality of this is dubious) to take it because if only a few banks were singled out, they would be disproportionately weakened.

In return for the cash in hand, the Federal Reserve took equity in the banks at their post-crash valuation, and has since sold it back to them for a multi-billion dollar profit to the government (the Federal Reserve is required to return its profits to the US Treasury). Basically almost everything people say about the bailout is entirely backwards.