How To Succeed At Business Without Really Trying

To recap the TARP program:

1. Banks bet on crappy subprime loans.
2. Crappy subprime loans went south.
3. Government bought loans to keep banks afloat.
4. Banks held on to crappy subprime loans because nobody wanted them still.
   
5. Government said "Okay fine" and wiped debt on crappy subprime loans.
6. NOW crappy subprime loans increased in value.
7. Banks now profiting off crappy subprime loans:

To understand the meaning of no good deed goes unpunished, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner can look no further than Wall Street where the banks that received the biggest taxpayer bailouts are seeking to reap trading profits from securities rescued by the government.


Only months after it was started, the U.S. program designed to purge debts of no immediate discernable value from the balance sheets of troubled banks has helped transform the frozen debt into a money-maker as the bonds have rallied. Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., who received 22 percent of the $418.7 billion American taxpayers loaned to troubled financial institutions, boosted holdings on their trading books of home- loan bonds that lack government guarantees while investors were raising cash for the program, according to Federal Reserve data.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America along with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., all based in New York, added a combined $2.74 billion of the debt, for which there were few buyers as recently as March, to their short-term trading assets during the third quarter, up 13 percent from the second quarter, the most-recent data show.

So yes, the whole "We paid back the TARP debt!" is really just a cover for the banks to continue to bet on the same dirty securities that got us into the mess, because now the banks know they can never lose money on them.  Ever.  The government will bail them out.