I'm shocked. Ritholtz:

Yesterday, in Backdoor Bailouts for Goldman Sachs?, we noted that GS, as well as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank, were all made whole [by the taxpayers] on their bad bets with AIG.

That’s right, what was misleadingly described as systemic risk turned out to be in large part little more than a counter-party bailout — money for the very same people who helped cause the problem.

Only the $25 billion figure I mentioned was off by 100% — the WSJ is reporting this morning it was $50 billion dollars, almost a third of $173 billion total AIG loot:

“The beneficiaries of the government’s bailout of American International Group Inc. include at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions that have been paid roughly $50 billion since the Federal Reserve first extended aid to the insurance giant.

Among those institutions are Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG, each of which received roughly $6 billion in payments between mid-September and December 2008, according to a confidential document and people familiar with the matter.

Other banks that received large payouts from AIG late last year include Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America Corp., and French bank Société Générale SA.

More than a dozen firms with smaller exposures to AIG also received payouts, including Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and HSBC Holdings PLC, according to the confidential document.”

Now you know why the Fed was so reluctant to reveal who the coutnerparties were.

And one might also wonder, back in October, when the Democrat wrote the TARP legislation NOW NOW NOW and Obama worked the phones for it, what the "systemic risk" was then? And when I say "what," I think I mean "who."

This is a giant FUCK YOU to the American taxpayer.* Isn’t there some Congressmen (besides Ron Paul) who are morally offended by the Paulson plan, which is slowly becoming the Geithner plan? Isn’t there anything that can be done?

And the Giethner plan is the Obama plan. Now, one of Obama's strengths is that he's never the one left holding the bag. The "shared sacrifice" schtick really isn't going to work much longer when it's so very evident whp's doing the sacrificing, and who's collecting the loot. Whether Obama has the ability to harness populist outrage, I don't know. It seems like an obvious way forward.

NOTE * Look! Over there! Rush Limbaugh!