Probably less than a 1% return on investment, just looking at the dollars involved and nothing more. And probably being generous at that, because the "profit" relies crucially upon what's likely to be judged by many who love the idea of TARP turning a profit as an inflated, bubble-like stock market.
Moreover, this is before inflation. In any given year inflation was at least 1%.
This is CYA accounting. Add up all expenses, add up all returns. What's missing is any thinking about what else that money could have done. Could it have been used to provide a larger return? If it hadn't been used, what would the losses have been? When you make financial decisions on anything more than petty purchases, those are the kinds of things people should think about: Is there a better use? What am I giving up? What need is being satisfied, and is it a need and not a want.
With TARP, we keep having such discussions but since the various sides can't agree on the facts (and when pushed for agreement, the topic shifts time and again).
The best this does is to avoid butt-obvious embarrassment. It's a rhetorical and not a substantive fig leaf.
For what it's worth, I'm on the side of TARP, but insist on saying that while it was a Bush II project over half of it was actually disbursed by Obama. On saying that while it had a good purpose, mitigating fiscal panic, a significant portion was used contrary to legislation for corporate bailouts for not so much economic as political purposes. Once the money was used for those purposes, the only recourse was for the Fed to do what TARP was supposed to do (although TARP was probably smaller than necessary, even before funds were siphoned off), with the consequence that the Fed probably overdid their program (again, partly for political purposes).
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