To people asking "Where's my check?": You have not paid anything yet, so stop asking.

@MostlyHarmless: More like "You honestly think the goverment will share any profits with taxpayers?"

Maybe they can use the money to pay down the national debt! /s

So how much of the $4 billion was raised in new and exciting bank fees?

@Mr_D:
Share profits like... investing in infrastructure? National healthcare?

Oh right, those things don't affect taxpayers at all, do they?

Government did something that ... worked? I am so confused.

@cmdrsass: Get back inside your box! Who told you you could think outside of it?!?!

how much of that 4 billion is freshly printed money?

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Even the worst baseball players can hit home runs every now and then.

With that money, they could have bought out Marvel Entertainment.
[www.marketwatch.com]

Governments don't generate wealth. They took a trillion from our grandkids and stand a chance of getting back $4 billion. wow. really impressive.

@Bahnburner: so far.....

@Bahnburner: No one took anything from your grandkids. That line is old and worn out. Also, the $4 billion is not what they got back, it's profit on top of what they got back. Eight banks have already paid back what they owed.

I'm not blind. I know there was some political cronyism at work during the bailouts. Some very well connected people got some very hefty loans from the government. But at the end of the day, that's all it was; loans. The money wasn't a gift; it was a loan, and is expected to be paid back. So feel free to unbunch your britches and take a deep breath. Your grandkids will be fine, (well, aside from being YOUR grandkids that is).

@Chris J. Stone: Damn straight! Hell of an investment it would be too. I mean hell, doesn't Obama already have his own damn comic book?

@Bahnburner: I agree with YOXIM... no one is getting free money. The money they took has to be repaid. So once the bank start making money, they will repay it. And all tht comes with an interest which will bring more money for ur grandkids.

Gads, the quality of NYT reporting is really going downhill fast. This alleged "profit" is pure BS.

Here's The Big Picture blog's take on the story:

[www.ritholtz.com]

@Dragonis: Funny how people forget all the little things, isn't it?

@Vandelay Import Export: Simply a matter of statistics.

The government can't possibly fail on EVERY initiative so if they are batting .100 we can say it's a good day

@shadow67: Unless we get an administration that forgives the banks debt because if they do not do that, the terrorists would have won.

That is always a problem.

@TexasP: Don't give people the truth behind the smoke screens, it will only confuse them more!

@TexasP: Meg mentions that in her summary, but the NYT does not. I think most of the investment is TBD. We could make money, we could lose money. But you're right, as of right now, we're running a big loss. Of course, printing what an administration says is nothing new as true journalism is a dying profession.

@Chris J. Stone: Noooooooo! Not Disney! This is a dark day.

@cmdrsass: We shall, once we return to taxing the upper 2% the same level as Ronald Reagan did when he checked out as President.
Fair, right? Isn't he some sort of patron saint of Republicanism?

@Bahnburner: So, just so I have this straight. You're saying that the government should shift to a for-profit model?
Or, you mean to say that you haven't thought through your Faux borrowed canard?

@Vandelay Import Export: Those fees are for your convenience! Don't be an ingrate.

@TexasP: You can't blame the NYT because they didn't write the article YOU would have written.
But the article THEY wrote was honest and accurate. To wit, their second & third paragraph (not so far to read, no?):
"The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually, according to calculations compiled for The New York Times.
These early returns are by no means a full accounting of the huge financial rescue undertaken by the federal government last year to stabilize teetering banks and other companies."

Third paragraph in. Yeesh. Too challenging for you to go that far?!

Tell you what. You become a good enough writer, researcher and analyst to be invited to interview for the NYT (let alone, y'know, getting an offer), then we'll talk. Until then, let the big boys in their long pants write their adult articles, mmkay?

I'm not entirely sure how they get a 15% return. They gave out $700billion, got $4billion back. That's about half a percent return.

Ahh. Remember the spittle-lipped rants of the wingnuts only a few months ago when they were screaming that we'd never see a dime back*?
Y'all are more than welcome to line up below and admit your error. G'head, man up and admit you were wrong. Guys? Guys?!

* Obviously, a long way to go, and many more multiples of the $4B to be paid back. But my point stands: many said we'd never see a dime of it back.

@Dragonis: Not in the least. that money would be much better spent as a $25 tax refund. [/sarcasm]

@aswearengen: They're only counting the eight banks that have repaid the loans. $4 billion in interest was generated off of thoes 8, creating a 15% return on the money loaned just to them.

@Trai_Dep: When I said never, I meant only 4 billion. From now on, never means never. Goddamn commie gubmint!

/Spittle-lipped rant

@Trai_Dep: I don't know who was saying that we'd never see "a dime of it back", but they were obviously unaware of the banks that did not want the money to begin with and were forced to take it (by the Bush Admin.) to cover for the banks that were "too big to fail" but were.

I know questioning the government has fallen out of vogue these days, but I don't find this $4 billion "profit" all that reassuring.

@Trai_Dep: I am sick to death of people trying to compare tax rates between this side of the last revision of the tax code in 1986. Yes, Reagan had much higher marginal tax rates, but there were also MANY more deductions. That revision was done to make the code LESS complex (sadly, most of that simplification has sense been undone).

@HiPwr: I see it as hopeful. I'd be interested in the number of loans that are officially in default (e.g. the bank has shut down, its considered bad debt from a GAAP perspective, etc.) compared to what's still outstanding.

As to questioning the government falling out of vogue, let me know when the current administration says that you're either with us or against us, you hate America, absolutely everything you do is to "support the troops," you want the terrorists to win, etc. Then we can talk.

@Trai_Dep: The problem with the bailouts is that they wouldn't fix the economy. We should have let insolvent companies go bankrupt.

"We never really had the fallout from the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble. We simply replaced one bubble with a bigger bubble, and we postponed the consequences of the unwinding of the imbalances until right now. And of course, we're still trying to postpone it. But I think at this point, the damage has been so great, and the problems are now so huge, that I don't think that there's another economic rabbit they can pull out of their hat at this point."

That was Peter Schiff in a speech he made about why the dot-com bubble happened and the housing market right after it:

@Tux the Penguin: So you're saying they had a buncha deductions back then and do now (sadly).
So my point stands. Why do you hate Reagan so much?

@MooseOfReason: By the way, fast forward in the video to about 5:30, when he talks about the bubbles.

@Trai_Dep: Actually, the deductions now aren't anywhere close to what they were then. You could conceivably be in the top bracket (which was right at 50%) and be paying on 25-30% on the next dollar of income. Add in some tax havens (which were plenty)...

What Reagan did that really had a lasting impact was lower the top rate from 70% to 50%. And then worked, and eventually got, real tax reform. It wasn't so much that taxes went down, its that the code was stripped down and people looked at it and said "what are we really trying to encourage with these deductions?"

We need that again, desperately. Really, I'd love to put myself out of a job if we made the tax code simple enough for the average American to do their own taxes. Heck, we have multi-BILLION dollar companies operating to just help people file their taxes. That's probably the best reason for tax reform.

@ARP: Ah, the tried-and-true "the last administration was worse" argument. I don't care about the last administration. I criticized them as well. I should be able to question my government any time I please without being called un-American by Bush officials, or Nancy Pelosi.

@HiPwr: But if you don't know where you've been, you don't know where to go. Throwing your hands up and exclaiming fair criticism as The Blame Game is giving a free pass to failed, disastrous policies. The same policies that some are arguing we return to.
To wit: the Free Market Fundamentalists, who blame regulation for everything and insist that if only we step out of the way, the unfettered market will cure all ills.
We're precisely in the fix we're in (and BELIEVE me, I hate the bailouts more than you, but I hate smoking rubble and Hoovervilles even worse) as a direct consequence of Conservatives successfully getting their policies implemented on the national and global stage.
Now, unhappy with the results and scared that the adults now in charge might pull us out of it (the global economy is barely shaking itself and rising to its feet, thanks to sensible, pragmatic policies), their prescription is - wait for it - less regulation and bigger tax cuts. Despite eight years of running the roost, with clear evidence of its (non)effectiveness.
It's madness. Plain, simple madness.

@Trai_Dep: I suppose you have to ask what it means to see a dime back. Do you mean a dime back in profit, or do you mean just some of our money back? Assuming the cost was 700 billion, and we've been paid pack 4B...we haven't seen a "profit" in the traditional sense of the word...we've seen an ROI. Not a great one in fact. So have we seen a dime back, yeah, but not in profit. We're still out 696B (assuming I'm reading everything properly).

Certainly it's more complicated than that, but I'm not at all impressed with what I'm hearing in this article.

Awesome. Now people will stop bitching about the bailouts. Sadly, now they'll start bitching about the government making a profit.

@HiPwr: Questioning the government has never "fallen out of vogue". People say this when they feel that their chorus has thinned out a bit and fewer people agree with them. You can question as much and as often as you like. The fact that other people don't care to listen (which is as much their right to do as it is your right to express your opinions), doesn't mean that questioning has fallen out of fashion. It just means that your views are no longer in sync with the vocal plurality. That means the zeitgeist has moved on without you.

@Trai_Dep: Not just drinking the Kool-Aid, but guzzling it!

@ShariC: Find me a poll that says that the majority of the American citizenry thinks that Congress and government in general is doing a bang-up job, and I'll give your argument some credance.

@Tux the Penguin: "Really, I'd love to put myself out of a job if we made the tax code simple enough for the average American to do their own taxes."

I fail to see what's so difficult with the current tax code for someone whose only income is one salary from one employer in one state...which covers the majority of tax payers.

I think rather than spend effort in making the tax code simpler, we should put the money in education so that when they get out of school they could answer simple questions like: "if your taxable income (from line blah of your W2) is between $35K and $40K, write 1 on line 6".

"We" haven't made $4 billion dollars. Fed.gov has admitted that the money loaned to Chrysler and GM is gone forever. As in never, ever.

if only the government can get money back they paid to people who dont want to work and collect a check or people that use government programs and dont pay taxes.

I hate to say it but even the NYT is having trouble with honest journalism these days. Thats not to make an ad-hominem attack on them however. If the banks have indeed repaid back 4 billion and they didn't receive tradeoffs or legislation or anything else, then that is indeed good.

It's also an incredibly tiny drop in the bucket. I'm happy for any drops, but they have to not only keep up the trend, but increase it 10,000 fold. If they do that, we'll be breaking even.

We are in pretty bad straights right now. I encourage any good news, we just have to hear a lot more of it.

I can't however trust the banks, in the same way I can't trust a spoiled child that if I give him a bit more money, "this time" he'll be good. There only seems to be incentive to misbehave and the government lending them oodles of cash there's little reason to stop.