If you have been holding your breath in anticipation of the bank stress tests, then you may want to start breathing again.  The actual results were not officially released, the summary is already available thanks to the leaks.

From Turner Radio Network, which admitted to already having a copy of the stress test results, “Of the top nineteen (19) banks in the nation, sixteen (16) are already technically insolvent.”

But wait you ask, what about all those banks “operating as a profit” and clamoring to repay the TARP funds early.   It’s all a public relations scam.  As Barron’s points out in their TLGP Sweet Deal article, TARP is just a drop in the bucket of the taxpayer funded handouts to banks; TLGP (Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program) is the real pain in the taxpayers side.  And the TLGP handouts are something insolvent financial institutions can not do without.

The government continues to provide major benefits to financial companies and, arguably, should have some input. But TLGP, not TARP, is the feds’ biggest source of largesse to financial firms…

Goldman would love to repay TARP and get back to doing business more or less as usual, paying its employees whatever it wants to pay them…

SOME WALL STREET ANALYSTS WONDER if Goldman will be given regulators’ approval to repay TARP, partly because it hasn’t been able to sell much debt without an FDIC guarantee.

The bottom line is that there are a dozen 4-letter words comprising programs of taxpayer funded handouts to incompetent and insolvent financial institutions.  It’s easy to lose site of them all, but any bank repaying TARP has only scratched the surface of making the taxpayer whole again!  And based on the leaked stress test results, making the taxpayer whole again will not be occurring anytime soon.