Did US Govt profit from the 2008 financial crash bailouts? This site here says that basically, the government sold back some of the assets it bought to bail-out banks during the financial crisis of '08. I'm assuming it was basically the federal bank that financed this bail-out, which we can see essentially get filled with mortgage backed securities here. I would think that if US Gvt did indeed get money from the bail-outs, the sheet would have been reduced to less than before? Is this an artifact of inflation?

No, the U.S. taxpayers lost about half a trillion dollars on the bailout.

This 2019 Annual Review of Financial Economics paper, prepared by Prof. Deborah Lucas from MIT's Sloan School of Business, explains how the half a trillion dollars figure came about.

> Table 2 summarizes the bailout costs using my preferred metric—a fair value basis around the time of the crisis. Those estimates total about $500 billion.

An article published by MIT Sloan summarises the paper.

> ![Mock up of bill totalling 498 billion](