Who Got Bailed Out By Whom?

Wolfgang and I have been discussing bailouts. Of course a bunch of banks got money, but many of them are paying off. Aside from them, WB says, in answer to:

>> Who got bailed out here?
Then just think about where the biggest losses were/are, which will (almost certainly) not be recovered. Ranked by the loss amount they are: Fannie, Freddie, AIG, GM and GMAC. The loss limit on F&F was recently raised from 200B$ each to basically unlimited.

So who were the beneficiaries here? All these corporations had their stockholder equity wiped out, so it wasn't them. Essentially all those who got were the bondholders or others who were owed money - seemingly the very "savers" Wolfgang is worried about. In the case of F&F, a big chunk of that debt, something like 1.5 trillion dollars was owed to foreigners, mostly banks. If those agencies had suddenly become unsellable, banks all over the world would have toppled like dominoes, and credit for the US would have disappeared, so what was the alternative?

To me, the most undeserving who were saved were the big Wall Street banks who did so much to provoke the crisis.

How would central banker Wolfgang (or Arun, or Cynthia, or Lee etc.) have handled the crisis?

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