Whenever someone trots out the administration’s line that TARP was a success because the government is likely to make a profit on the bank bailouts, I reply with a hypothetical. The government could have also “bailed out” a perfectly healthy, up-and-coming company like Google in October 2008, and would have realized a huge profit by now. But that doesn’t mean it would have been a good thing to do.
Now it seems, however, that that scenario might not be so hypothetical after all.
