Success supposedly has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. Yet the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), adopted by Congress 10 years ago this month (10/3) to fight the financial crisis, is arguably a successful orphan. It is one of the few—perhaps the only—actions the federal government took during the crisis and subsequent recession that made things better, and it even netted Uncle Sam a profit. Yet today TARP is universally despised across the political spectrum.

To understand why TARP helped, we need to better understand the financial crisis. My last column described how, in the middle of last decade, an unusually large percentage of homeowners stopped paying their mortgages after soaring energy prices hurt their finances. That, in turn, frightened investors and lenders and resulted in something akin to an old-fashioned “bank run,” though affecting financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers instead of traditional deposit banks.

To understand this, think of how a deposit bank works. Bank operations are precarious. They take in deposits and then lend out much of that money, earning interest for themselves and their customers and investors. As a result, the money in deposit banks’ vaults is only a fraction of their deposits (hence the term “fractional banking”). Banks use their experience and projections to determine how much money they must have on hand for customers’ needs.

If you’ve seen the Jimmy Stewart classic It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ve seen what happens when those projections misalign with customers’ demands. When a rumor circulated in Bedford Falls that the Bailey Building and Loan was in trouble, people ran on the bank to withdraw their money. In fact, the bank was fine, but the sudden, rumor-fueled spike in withdrawals put it in jeopardy, hurting both depositors and borrowers as well as the bank.

Stewart’s character, George, explains why he can’t pay out all of the deposits: “You’re thinking of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. That money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house, … and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house and a hundred others.”

As long as George’s borrowers usually paid their mortgages on time and there were no runs, the bank had enough money. Likewise, as long as people usually pay their debts on time, the U.S. financial system operates fine. But when payments slow and runs occur, disaster can follow.

When mortgage defaults soared last decade, frightened customers didn’t queue up outside of financial institutions to withdraw money. However, lenders and investors did refuse to continue putting their money into financial institutions, which meant the institutions couldn’t keep offering mortgages and other financing for the American economy. The country was already in a mild economic downturn, but the sudden loss of credit severely deepened it.

The thing is, over the long term, many of those defaults would resolve themselves as homeowners found ways to make payments, and houses that did end in foreclosure were sold to new homebuyers. But that took time, and investors and lenders—like George’s depositors—didn’t want their money at risk.

TARP addressed this. Under the program, the U.S. Treasury initially bought troubled mortgages (technically, they bought financial assets that were backed by mortgages) and later bought stock in the financial institutions themselves. The Treasury then waited for things to improve, at which time they could sell off the financial assets to cover TARP’s costs. Financial institutions used the money from the sales to resume financing the economy. Though the country still fell into a bad recession, it would have been far worse without TARP.

The bailout worked out well for Uncle Sam. The feds spent $426.4 billion on these assets and later sold them for $441.7 billion, yielding a small profit. (It should be noted the program also bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, and those were loser for taxpayers.)

People commonly think that “fiscal stimulus”—government ramping up spending and cutting taxes—is the way to fight recessions. Economic research shows that fiscal stimulus has had very little effect on recessions historically; even the enormous New Deal programs sparked relatively little consumer spending. Instead, the potent anti-recession tool is “monetary stimulus”—lowering interest rates, increasing the money supply and backstopping financial institutions. By easing the financial panic and expanding the money supply, TARP—along with “quantitative easing” by the Federal Reserve—halted the contraction of the American economy.

I still dislike TARP. It was an unprecedented government intervention in the economy, it bailed out financial institutions that deserved to be reorganized, and those institutions likely now believe that government will ride to their rescue again if they get in new trouble. But in the context of last decade’s financial crisis and recession, TARP did some good. That should be acknowledged a decade later.

Thomas A. Firey is a Maryland Public Policy Institute senior fellow and a Washington County native.