...because the Federal Reserve offered the real bailout. TARP's few hundred billion would be worth far less had the Fed not printed trillions, and used it to buy all of the banks' bad MBSs at above-market rates.
A lot of unnecessary M&A activity is powered by cheap loans. On the other hand, if conservative investments were returning a decent return, the VC industry wouldn't be awash with cash.
Here are the top four [2]:
Citigroup - 2.5 T$
Morgan Stanley - 2.0 T$
Merrill Lynch - 1.9 T$
BOA - 1.3 T$
[1]: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf (Table 8, PDF page 144)
[2]: http://www.sott.net/article/250592-Audit-of-the-Federal-Rese...
For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30 days. In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight.
Your fully unreturned is incorrect, many of the loans used to create those totals were payed back the very next day after they were made.
A more interesting analysis would show a plot of the outstanding loan balance each institution maintained over time.
All loans extended under this facility were repaid in full, with interest, in accordance with the terms of the facility.