Almost the majority of Wall Street refused the bailout money. Paulson almost force them. The bailout money eventually made a profit ($15B). One could argue that the return rate was low (0.6% annualized), but still, this is far different from what most people have believed till this day: i.e., US gov just gave taxpayer's money away to the banks to cover their ass.
Paulson also almost managed to save Lehman Brothers until British Gov said no to Barclay's role in the plan. (Wall Street banks would acquire LB's "good assets" while Barclay would buy their toxic ones as its gateway to become a more influential player in US market.). But even Lehman didn't reach out to Pualson to get itself saved. It's the other way around: Paulson was trying many ways to save Lehman because he knew when Lehman went down, market would panic and then even those banks in good shape would be affected.
http://www.reuters.com/article/barclays-lehman-idUSLDE62B258...
You can't trust anything in Too Big To Fail, unfortunately. Shame, it reads really well.
It depends on how you calculate it but, actual costs where over 50 billion net loss. But, it was really important for politicians to point to it as a 'success' so there is more than a little creative accounting going on.
Every official source that explains the 2008 crisis is full of lies. The big banks all engaged in massive fraud and the bailout was the cover up.
Same idea with the guys getting rich of off of patents in the pharma industry (e.g. EpiPen). Nothing these forms are doing is technically illegal.
But the reason some of these guys are gonna be crucified is the arrogance and lack of public contrition. They really need to take a page from the banking execs of 2008 who cried no-fault all the way to the bank.