A survey released today by the Association of Financial Professionals will do nothing to dampen the austerity versus stimulus debate.

To wit: Forty-three percent of US corporations had larger US cash and short-term investment holdings this May than they did six months earlier. Only 24 percent of respondents reported that their short-term holdings had shrunk during the past six months.

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.

Lost in the hubbub over the end of the GOP filibuster of bank reform and Goldman Sachs' role in the crisis that spawned the need for it is the news that Tim Geithner's spine has stiffened on what exactly to do. Or at least that's how I read this Times article.

I'm talking about Geithner's position on the so-called bank tax. Several months ago, he threw cold water on the idea of a special levy on banks, despite pressure for such a tax from his European counterparts.

Better late than never, I suppose. But Big Bob Rubin has apparently had a change of heart as to the virtues of financial deregulation.

Appearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today with former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince in his capacity as former vice chairman of the bailed out bank, Rubin expressed much different sentiments about the need to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail and derivatives from adding untold amounts of undetectable leverage to the financial system than he did when he was President Clinton's deregulator in chief.

Banks' repayments of TARP preferred stock and warrants are turning a profit for the US Treasury, but taxpayers are still supporting financial institutions in many other ways.

As of March 30, the government earned an 8.5 percent annualized return on the funds that it supplied to 49 companies that have exited the Capital Purchase Program and the Target Investment Program, according to an analysis by SNL Financial.

PNC Financial on Tuesday announced that it reached an agreement with its banking regulators and the Treasury Department permitting it to redeem the $7.6 billion of preferred shares it sold under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

As part of the plan, as most banks repaying TARP funds have done, PNC announced it will sell common stock. In its case, PNC will offer $3 billion worth of shares.

But unlike other banks, PNC concurrently announced the sale of a division, its investment-servicing unit, to BNY Mellon for $2.3 billion, the proceeds of which will go toward the TARP payment.

One thing that puzzled me about the tax break that the Treasury agreed to provide to Citigroup is that the U.S. owns own 34 percent of the bank, so how would the sale of the Treasury's stake trigger a rule against trafficking in net operating losses, since they apply to a change of ownership?

Answer, the rule applies to the total percentage that would change hands among those shareholders owning at least 5 percent of the common. And as tax and accounting guru Bob Willens explained to me just now, that would have exceeded 50 percent in this case because of the bank's recapitalization last July.

It looks as if the market is more rational than the Treasury thought, or at least a bit less foolish about the reality facing banks like Citigroup, and may have to hold onto its shares for just a tad longer.

When J.P. Morgan analysts in effect said last week that Citi investors would swallow this because they are dumb money, Tim Geithner should have known that his Ponzi scheme was on thin ice.

Now that Wells Fargo and Citigroup have announced plans to pay back their TARP funds, the biggest bailout recipients outside of American International Group and General Motors have freed themselves from the most intrusive of government oversight, i.e., nobody in Washington is going to tell them how to pay their employees.

With the strings that came with those billions of dollars removed -- though they arguably were too loose and too light to begin with -- the greatest changes to Wall Street will likely have to come through legislation and not the Treasury.

Meet the new bosses of the banking world. They're literally the same as the old bosses.

No, there will be no remaking of the top ranks even after every single one of them must have had their lives flash before their eyes at some point over the last year. Predictions that mid-sized, conservative banks would scoop up deposits and become big players haven't come true.

KBW, an investment bank focused on the financial sector, said in a note to investors on Friday that it "is recommending all of the trillion-dollar asset institutions that have emerged from the crisis and have repaid (or have announced plans to repay) the U.S. government's investment." Those banks include  J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

"Once these large companies have removed the government from their balance sheets ten they are at a competitive advantage," KBW said.