Academic

Check out Steve Davidoff's review of the TARP so far, which, as he explains, has turned from a bank bailout into an auto bailout:

Meanwhile, the United States has sunk more than $79.7 billion into the automakers at this point. (Look it up in the Treasury Department?s transactions report.) The C.B.O. recently estimated that the subsidy rate in the first $55 billion of this investment was more than $40 billion in lost value, or roughly 70 percent ? the highest subsidy rate of any TARP investment.

...[I]n real dollars, the United States is now likely to lose more on the automakers than on the rest of its TARP investments, including in American International Group.