“The point is there will be lots of creative ways people get bailed out and there doesnt have to be one single solution. In these cases, the loss was going to happen and by re-writing the loan at a lower amount the bank came out ahead vs. foreclusre. The shareholders only care about returns and this increased the returns so I doubt they would crucify the bank for doing this.”

Creative ways….that really doesn’t give any real sense of comfort. One way or another it comes back to bite someone.
I imagine that a similar train of thought was running around before the S&L implosion from the non to distant past.