You never hear any dialogue on that topic. Yet, around my area, the RW media zombies still bitch about the auto bailout, never giving a thought about how it averted an economic disaster that would have rippled to areas outside the auto industry.

Treasury just sold the last of its AIG investment, realizing $22.5 billion profit in the process. So the bailout investment we made in AIG, which is a "Wall street bankster," generated a profit to the taxpayer. That answers your question in part; AIG has repaid the federal government, with a $22.5 billion bonus. AIG gained nothing, because it is no longer in business.

The government is selling shares back to GM now for $27.50 per share, but it needs for those shares to be valued at $53/share to break even on the investment it made to bail out GM, so we will not recoup our money on that deal.

So bailing out AIG turned a profit, while bailing out GM saved jobs and allowed GM to return to making a profit but lost money for taxpayers. You might think that either GM or the workers would want to thank the government for the bailout, but no: GM buys their shares back for a loss to the government, and the workers want tax cuts.

a total of $245 billion was loaned out to banks, mostly to bolster their balance sheets to comply with stricter capitalization rules. The goal was to allow them to continue operating as usual, with stronger backing, as they built up funds to repay the loans. The great majority of that worked as hoped for, and most was repaid with interest; so there is currently a profit showing to the government on the banking side of the program. If you remember the predictions and prognostications of absolute doom and collapse, this was a ballsy program that succeeded. There are many small banks that haven't paid their loans back yet, but the totals owing are around $7 billion, less that 3%.

The "trillions and trillions!" figure comes from another briefer and different effort, where the fed made short term (mostly overnight) loans to banks at low interest rates. All of these were repaid, and the beef there is that some millions more in profit should have been made if the interest rates charged were at-market. Hindsight is petty; again, if you look at the actual possibility of collapse, avoiding it successfully with unprecedented efforts was a risk that paid off - we've had steady economic growth since the day the stimulus was enacted, and it has cost much less than predicted.

on edit - link to some information: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/06/business/la-fi-banks-tarp-20120706

I'd like to see where that information is verified.

It was up on Google news reader and I wrote down the notes I needed and didn't bother to keep the link. It disappeared from Google, as WSJ articles usually do as soon as the WSJ discovers they are there. It should not be hard to find, though if you look for it, as it's all public information.

I had hoped the price would have been higher by now. The other thing you have to factor in is the administrative cost of both the bailouts to the government. I'm sure that was quite a bit as well.

Once getting past the fiscal cliff circus, the economy has the tailwinds of improving housing, lower energy prices and tail risk events like a Eurozone breakup minimised. The market has the potential to really rally next year. I suspect selling GM shares now will have been a major mistake.