Goodbye, CIT! We’ll miss you! Ancient (101 years young!) commercial lender CIT Group filed Chapter 11 yesterday, while everyone was in church and on my dear mother’s birthday, even. What does this mean for you? Well, for one, you’re not gonna get that $2.3b in TARP money back. Hope you weren’t floating any checks on that.

CIT Group Inc., the 101-year-old commercial lender that saw its funding dry up in the credit crunch, filed for bankruptcy in an effort to cut $10 billion in debt following a failed debt exchange and U.S. taxpayer bailout.

CIT listed $71 billion in assets and $64.9 billion in liabilities in a Chapter 11 petition yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The Treasury Department said the government probably won’t recover much, if any, of the $2.3 billion in taxpayer money that went to CIT.

CIT was one of those lenders that most people hadn’t heard of directly, but that few of us could live without. One of their most important services was factoring, or accounts receivable loans – wherein they would basically buy the outstanding invoices from a business to get some cash in the business’ pocket right away, enabling them to buy more supplies to make more stuff to sell to the rest of us, who in turn can never have enough stuff. Wanna open your own Dunkin Donuts franchise? Call CIT, they will (would have) hook (hooked) you up. Need to lease a railroad car or twelve to move your stuff? CIT. And so on.

So this is actually kind of a big deal. In fact, it’s the fifth-largest US bankruptcy in like EVER, coming in just behind GM. And like GM, CIT is hoping for a quick one, having put together a prepackaged bankruptcy plan back last month when it knew deep down that no one loved it enough to save it. Shareholders, of course, are going to be wiped out and bondholders are going to lose 30% of their investments, but they’re getting stock too so that’s totally okay. Carl Icahn, the company’s largest bondholder (by assets, not by weight), is also supposedly getting a pony in addition to the new common stock. He should probably get a full-on horse, because he’s putting up the $1b or so to keep the lender operating during its bee-kay-tion.