Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
What I don't like is that the TBTF banks never pay back for having been saved.

In the US that hasn't been entirely true. The government got back all the money, plus a return, from BofA. They made a good chunk of money back from AIG, though AIG was so in the hole that there was no way they'd ever recover all of it.

We see it here with the "Hypo Real Estate" bank which was considered as an Too Big To Fail bank as well - it was saved through hunfreds of millions or even more money through the government -> the tax payers in the end - and they were still doling out ten thousands or even millions of "bonus payments" to high-level employees …

Goldman essentially did that after getting in essence a bailout via AIG. It was pretty disgusting, but at the same time, they never received any money directly from the government, so its hard to find a legal or legitimate way to say they shouldn't have done that. The real issue was that the government never should have paid 100 cents on the dollar for AIG's CDS contracts.