Taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street begin long before the average taxpayer even knows that something is up.
The Bush Administration began bailing out the imploding real estate industry back in March of 2008.
Months before COVID-19 and the subsequent bailouts and stimulus packages were a thing, the Federal Reserve had already injected more than $4 Trillion into Wall Street. A practice that Nomi Prins calls a "ponzi scheme".
Once again the federal government is preparing to bail out Wall Street.

The Treasuries market has swelled from $5 trillion in 2007 and $17 trillion in early 2020, while banks are facing more regulatory constraints that they say make it more difficult to intermediate trades.

The Treasury is asking dealers about the specifics of how buybacks could work “in order to better assess the merits and limitations of implementing a buyback program.”

These include how much it would need to buy in so-called off-the-run Treasuries, which are older and less liquid issues, in order to “meaningfully” improve liquidity in these securities.

When an asset is illiquid it's because no one wants it at the price it is being offered. There are two possible solutions for that 1) reset the price to a level that the market responds, or 2) make the taxpayer absorb the loss.

“Buybacks would allow banks to get [bonds] off their balance sheet when there are no buyers and would allow them to use their balance sheet more efficiently.”

So why would Wall Street need another taxpayer bailout? Because no one goes to jail for rigging the markets, and risky casino gambling is rewarded.

“In a recent working paper analyzing who banks chose as counterparties in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, the authors found that banks are more likely to choose riskier nonbank counterparties that are already heavily connected and exposed to other banks, which leads to an even more densely connected network. Furthermore, banks do not hedge these exposures, but rather increase them by selling rather than purchasing credit derivative swaps against these counterparties. Finally, the authors found that common counterparty exposures are correlated with systemic risk measures despite greater regulatory oversight following the 2008 financial crisis.”
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“Network connections and choice of counterparties is especially important in the derivative markets. Uncleared derivatives account for approximately half of all derivative activities by banks, making them a significant fraction of their trading operations overall. Half of these are represented by nonbank counterparties with multiple bank dealers. Losses on uncleared derivatives are fully borne by the bank, whereas losses for cleared derivatives are mutualized across member firms of the clearinghouse.”

For the first time trading revenues at federally-insured commercial banks eclipsed the trading revenues at bank holding companies. Wall Street casino betting with your federally insured deposits was against the law from 1934 to 1999.