Rick Newman, On Friday August 26, 2011, 3:28 pm EDT

There’s one big group of Americans who still haven’t received much of a bailout from Washington–homeowners. Now, there’s a growing chance the Obama administration may finally do something to help the little guy directly.

Up till now, bailout theory has hinged on helping banks, corporations, and other big institutions, which would then–supposedly–pass the largesse on to consumers through low interest rates, generous lending standards and bounteous hiring. That’s why Washington offered trillions of dollars in bailout funds, loans, and guarantees to many of the biggest companies in the world. There was the controversial TARP program, which injected money into banks to shore them up during the 2008 financial crisis. The Federal Reserve has done even more, with a variety of “lending facilities” that provided cheap loans to barons of capitalism such as Citibank, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and even several foreign banks. The Fed has also pushed interest rates to record lows, to reduce borrowing costs for everybody and help compensate for a sharp drop in household wealth.

That extraordinary amount of aid has clearly helped U.S. banks–which might still be battling insolvency fears if not for Washington’s help–and big corporations, which are remarkably healthy and have been loading up on cash. But it has not trickled through to ordinary Americans the way policymakers hoped, and that is one of the biggest reasons the economy is still gasping for air.

One simple set of numbers helps explain the problem. When the recession began at the end of 2007, the prime interest rate was 7.25 percent. Today it’s 3.25 percent. The prime rate is the rate at which the most credit-worthy borrowers–usually big companies–can get loans. Most big borrowers don’t get the prime rate, but they do get a rate that’s directly tied to prime. So as the Fed has forced rates down, institutional borrowers have directly benefited, with overall borrowing costs about four points lower than they were before the recession began.

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