the stock taken by the US/UK governments are preferred shares that come without voting rights. In the US, taking the money puts limits on raising dividend rates and limits executive pay until the governments shares are sold back to the bank.
This conspiracy theory is silly for a number of reasons:
1. Banks, Brokers, Exchanges, Insurance and Commodity traders are already regulated, their representatives are licensed and regulators have a variety of rights to audit certain aspects of the business already.
2. The government already has lots ablility to look at banking/financial information via the patriot Act. In short It’s Already Happening
3. Joining regulatory agencies in the US into a sort of Super Regulator, is likely inevitable and would happen with or without the government buying into the banks.
This particular method of bailing out banks was just considered the fastest and least expensive way. It was initially rejected by the administration because they’d rather use the $750 billion to buy worthless securitys to recapitalize the banks, than buying equity and let the banks deal with their own “assets”, because they can’t bear the idea that something so socialist could happen. Better than paying gold for garbage in my mind