Tim Geithner once again says taxpayers are getting a good return on the funds they provided banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

And his line about 75 percent of the money being repaid may be true enough. It may even reflect this uncomfortable fact.

I see that the slow boat to financial reform continues to drift sideways, as Senate Banking Committee member Bob Corker followed Paul Volcker's call for action yesterday with a sorry-no-can-do.

Unlike health-care reform, Democrats will need the support of a Republican like Corker to get a bill containing resolution authority for big banks, derivatives regulation, and consumer protection enacted this year. Only one piece of legislation can be passed through the budget reconciliation process in any one year, and now that the process was used for health-care reform, everything else will require a filibuster-proof majority that the Democrats no longer have.

A conference on financial reform held today by the Roosevelt Institute really tells it like it is when it comes to what's going on in the nation's capital. And "it" isn't pretty. 

I just heard Congressional TARP cop Elizabeth Warren, for example, accuse banks of "bullying" Washington into doing its bidding over consumer protection.

Surely, the recent report from the Congressional Oversight Panel that banks have done little to address the toxic assets on their books, underscores a fundamental point:  The government bailout has mostly allowed the usual suspects to keep on conducting business as usual.

In fact, here's more evidence. A bunch of banks have come up with new and improved products and investments, and, while they don't have the potential to bring down the global economy, they sound pretty risky to me.