Thanks to Matt Taibbi’s wonderful article “The Great American Bubble Machine,” I was inspired to do some more bailout math.

It looks to me like Goldman Sachs won big on the bailout. They got a $13 billion windfall from the AIG bailout. They got a $10 billion bailout in TARP that they paid back when they were ready. They got to become a bank holding company so they can raise capital using the FDIC credit. Can you imagine how cheap your borrowing rates would be if you could offer your creditors a federal guarantee? So your credit card rate would be 2% instead of 36%.

OK, the Fed lent the big banks $8.7 trillion. However, it is secret where that went. So we will not even count how much Goldman got from that or how much they made lending that money back to the U.S. government to finance the deficits that are increasing daily, in no small part thanks to Goldman.