Banks took all that bailout money and didn't increase lending, because Congress didn't add even minimal strings to the cash.
And we've certainly noticed that the president has pulled in $15.6 million from Wall Street for his own campaign and the Democratic party. That's why we Occupy!
The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.
Wall Street firms independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show.
Behind this turnaround, in significant measure, are government policies that helped the financial sector avert collapse and then gave financial firms huge benefits on the path to recovery. For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks low-cost money that the firms used for high-yielding investments on which they made big profits.
"There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street," said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. "That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened."