The US bail outs that bought the bad stuff from the banks and slowly sold them off as the market allowed made a nominal profit.
(TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6% and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.)
The other kind is what the central bank does, basically quantitative easing, just providing low interest loans to financial institutions - and basically to the government too (by buying US Treasury bonds on the open market). And then it becomes the banks' job to determine who to give loans to, and if they make bad calls eventually they will lose a lot of equity, so there market forces usually help separating the worse from the less bad.
The other option is to have the bank in question issue more equity for the state to buy.
The Norwegian government for example still owns more than a third of the biggest Norwegian bank as a holdover from a much earlier financial crisis (1990), and decided not to sell down further as a strategic decision to prevent future meltdowns.
The UK similarly bought a lot of bank assets during the 2008 crisis.
The US bail outs that bought the bad stuff from the banks and slowly sold them off as the market allowed made a nominal profit.
(TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6% and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.)
The other kind is what the central bank does, basically quantitative easing, just providing low interest loans to financial institutions - and basically to the government too (by buying US Treasury bonds on the open market). And then it becomes the banks' job to determine who to give loans to, and if they make bad calls eventually they will lose a lot of equity, so there market forces usually help separating the worse from the less bad.