Ah! Brendan, you didn't have to go to BBC4 to get that description, it was already posted here on this threadI heard a guy on BBC Radio 4 referring to the bail out of the banking system. That is a much better description.
So perhaps the correct terminology is the "banking institutions needed a bail out"
I take the point about "...we did nothing for the ordinary people." But in fairness, to a lot of ordinary people whose jobs were lost or businesses that were closed, it would have felt that way.
Conversely, a lot of people and a lot of businesses were kept a float that would otherwise have gone under had the banking system been allowed to collapse.