Ok, I honestly was not very enthusiastic for the whole government bailout program for a couple of reasons.
1. It would reward bad business practices by saving groups who made bad financial decisions.
2. I could see this leading to the 'bailing out' of other companies. If you did it for them, why won't you do it for us?
3. Would you really trust how the money was going to be used? I mean look at what they did with their own money, and you expect them to do better with my (the taxpayers) money?
4. It will end up costing a LOT more than the advertised 700 billion dollars.
Now on the other hand I heard how this would help us get out of an economic slump, re-invigorate the financial industry, and overall was just a good thing to do.
I have yet to see or hear about any major impact in the mortgage industry (the one I work in) although I'm not sure how long it would take to show up. I would've expected claims on default mortgages to drop, not increase dramatically after the bailout was doled out.
I have heard about several banks that have gotten bailout money, buying other banks. And these aren't small banks from what I've heard, they are banks that also received bailout money so basically the purchasing bank is double dipping.
I'm going to dig around and see if I can find any other hard information about the bailout money and where it's going and post what I find.