When the financial meltdown hit (under GW's watch, BTW), if drastic action wasn't taken you would have stuck your ATM card in the machine and nothing would have come out.  The banking system was teetering on complete collapse.  Bush duct-taped it with TARP by opening the nation's wallet and bending us over.  Obama took the next step following the advice of Bernanke, whose special are of research was analyzing what we did wrong during the Great Depression.

I'm not a monetary policy economist, and I'm pretty sure you're not either, so I'm not qualified to render judgment on whether these actions were the best options.  But I'm pretty certain we got screwed by the banks and credit rating agencies.  I doubt that whoever was president was going to look good on the other end. 

Our debt is too high, but our economy is still chugging along, other than the growing wealth disparity - the bottom going lower, the top getting richer.   

Always easy to armchair QB though.