It’s all a rigged shell game. They made money going broke, they made money getting help and now they’re making money repaying that help. And we just pay and pay and…

More than $50 billion of new capital was raised as part of the effort by the biggest banks to repay the money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and get out from under the thumb — and pay caps — of Washington.

All told, December was the biggest month in history for offerings, according to Thomson Reuters.

Here’s what the post-bailout bonanza means for all the banks that helped find investors for the new shares: Bank of America’s $19.3 billion offering generated $482 million in fees; Citigroup’s $17 billion offering resulted in $425 million in fees; and Wells Fargo’s $12.2 billion offering led to $275.6 million in fees. (The banks paid themselves roughly 2.5 percent of the offering price.)
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On the fees from the post-bailout offerings, there is an element in all of this of just moving money from one pocket to another.

After all, paying yourself a fee just means the cost of the offering is lower than if you had used an outside bank to do the work. It’s not real revenue.

But when bonus time comes, and when employees tally up the work they did for the year, they will be compensated for their work on these offerings as if they had worked for an outside client.
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While many on Wall Street may hold a dim view of the Treasury, one banker I spoke with said he had a message for Timothy F. Geithner: “Thank you.”