But They Passed The Stress Tests!!!

Move along, nothing to see here:

Sometimes, personal-finance gurus advise cash-strapped consumers to pay off their high interest-rate credit cards by using a lower-rate one.

Banks have been trying the same tactic to get out from what they owe to Uncle Sam - by borrowing from Uncle Sam. And guess what? Uncle Sam is encouraging it.

TARP, the US Treasury’s $700 billion bailout of banks and the housing market, technically expired all the way back in October 2010. The exhausting debate about whether TARP was successful persisted more than two years after the program started. Neil Barofsky, the official in charge of keeping TARP accountable, stepped down in February and slammed the program in a New York Times op-ed in March.

So it’s no surprise the government wants to clear its rolls of the hundreds of banks that have been dawdling in paying back their TARP bailouts from January 2009. Keefe Bruyette & Woods says that Treasury has $19.1 billion still invested in about 473 banks through TARP.

How to do that? Funnel them to yet another Treasury bank-stimulus program. So earlier this year, a Treasury official dropped a big hint: some banks might want to pay back TARP - hint, hint - by applying for loans from the newly established $30 billion Small Business Lending Fund.

If "finding jobs for unemployed people" could somehow be called "bailing out insolvent banks", imagine how many creative solutions the administration would find!