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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

In the form of loans. Far from a perfect program, but from Wikipedia:

> On December 19, 2014, the U.S. Treasury sold its remaining holdings of Ally Financial, essentially ending the program. Through the Treasury, the US Government actually booked $15.3 billion in profit, as it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

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So they actually lost money compared to the treasury just not selling $426 billion in bonds.

Very rough calculation on my phone without looking up specific yields and dates: 5-year cost to the treasury for selling $426 billion in bonds is ~$443 billion (4% yield)

Ehh, if you're going to factor in opportunity cost then you must also account for the would-be impact to the overall economy had TARP not been enacted.

This isn’t opportunity costs, the government had to sell bonds to do all that because wasn’t sitting on cash.

I’m just saying that I don’t think “it was a profitable program” is true.

Factoring the overall benefits to the economy is obviously the right way to judge it and is (mostly) unrelated to its direct profitability.

I hear you but ISTM that "it was a profitable program" is more (partially) accurate than "the government just gave money away to big bad banks that should have gone into healthcare and education instead"

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