The article states that "none of the special lending programs has lost money," implying that they were all loans, and are all being paid back.
Bernanke and co deserve huge credit for sticking to their guns throughout the crisis, despite criticism from all sides and the inauguration of a new president.
I disagree. Giving credit is as much a bailout as giving cash.
What Bernanke and company did was breath enough life into the previous bubble to allow it to limp into survival.
The survival of the bubble is huge tax on any ongoing economic activity - essentially it's the same policy that lead to Japan's Lost Decade and indeed has lead to an economy that will be more or less permanently indebted to Wall Street.
I would admit that the bail-out was an inevitable result of the previous ten-twenty years of building too-big-to fail enterprises on who's survival the whole of Wall Street Finance was (correctly-so-far) bet. These bets were naturally helped by the large investment houses having interchangeable personel with the policy makers.
Actually, one of the things that bothers me most about all of the bailouts is that many of them are not being repaid. At least not in the way that some people are intimating.
HD, for instance is actually able to "repay" via the mechanism of a somewhat hastily arranged private sector bailout by Buffet's Berkshire and Davis. The reason everyone is obliged to try to prop HD up is because, through financial instruments of truly byzantine design, HD's customers were given loans for their motorcycles which were used as backing for certain securities. I won't get into the details, but the short story is HD customers won't repay their loans. Worst part...even if they had, it is not clear that the math would have worked out, and there may have been problems in any case.
This is why Buffet cautions us to "Beware geeks bearing formulas".
I'm not saying that what the Fed did was wrong...Rome was burning...I won't second guess them.
I do think people should realize that the problems are still with us however. What has happened is simply some creative juggling of the debts. This stuff takes time to unwind carefully, and even then some party will need to lose. It's just that there is a need to find more creative, and less obvious, methods of making that loser the Government, ie... tax payer. Because, that is the only party with the requisite resources.
And that is where the interesting stuff happens, engineering the repayment of the bailout funds. Sometimes it is repaid with securities of questionable value. Sometimes with hard assets, of dubious utility. They have even done some really brilliant things, like funneling stimulus funds to some of these companies...which were then used to pay back their bailouts. Of course, it looks like these companies paid the money back with revenues from new business.
This whole thing has been fascinating to watch. Again, I think the interesting parts were not the bailouts, but HOW the bailouts were being repaid.
Bernanke and co deserve huge credit for sticking to their guns throughout the crisis, despite criticism from all sides and the inauguration of a new president.