Financial institutions received billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury in the form of preferred equity under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008. Investments were made during a bad state, but the repayments came in a relatively good time. Comparing TARP's realized returns to...

The Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury bought several individual corporate bonds in response to COVID-19. We show that the program purchased bonds that became highly information-sensitive due to the crisis, bonds used as collateral in the repo market by primary bond dealers, and bonds...