With “a little” interest, not at all commensurate with the risk taxpayers took on with the bailout investment
> Unfortunately, the return paid on TARP did not keep pace with these private returns. Thus, taxpayers ended up subsidizing banks, and hence the narrative that “banks paid every penny of TARP with interest” is a bit misleading and certainly incomplete.
> But the gains from the recovery were captured disproportionately by the recipient banks. Hence a nuanced interpretation of our results is that the TARP return was less-than-fair for the risk it imposed on the taxpayers, and the banks ended up getting a subsidy to the tunes of billions of dollars in the process.
https://news.umich.edu/bailout-of-financial-sector-during-gr...