On Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it had sold its remaining shares of Ally Financial, the former financing subsidiary of General Motors, for $1.3 billion, effectively ending the auto and bank bailouts it began under President George W. Bush in 2008.
The government also announced that the Troubled Asset Relief Program for banks and the Detroit bailouts yielded $15.35 billion in profit. The investment in what is now called Ally Financial yielded $2.4 billion in profit alone.
Through those programs and related efforts, $426.35 billion in government money was injected into the financial and auto sectors during the turbulence of the financial crisis. Interest payments and stock sales since then have brought in $441.7 billion. The auto rescue itself, however, has not turned a profit, losing $9.5 billion mostly related to General Motors paying back just $39 billion of the $49.5 billion it received.
The government still has less than $1 billion invested in 35 small community banks. It no longer owns any part of the automotive industry.
The bailouts had other impacts besides bringing returns to government coffers. While the auto bailout may not have brought in a profit, a report from the end of last year found that it saved about 2.6 million jobs in 2009 and 1.5 million jobs in 2010. By doing so, it also boosted personal income by more than $284 billion in those years.
Critiques of the bailouts came from both the right and left, and on the right they helped spark the Tea Party movement. Others charged that the government did more to help the financial companies that brought about the crash in the first place than it did struggling homeowners caught up in the foreclosure crisis. The programs aimed at helping underwater borrowers stay in their homes that were included in the bailouts have generally paid out just fractions of what they were given and failed to reach as many homeowners as they said they would. Meanwhile, the National Mortgage Settlement with banks over abusive foreclosure tactics has failed to bring meaningful relief to borrowers or stop those practices.