The wolf was at the door again last night...

I could tell from the trail of unpaid TARP receipts left behind on the front walk this morning.

For all the hardball squeezing banks put their customers through, compounding costly penalities and late fees on every tardy payment, they sure don't bust their asses reimbursing federal bailout money they've gotten over the past year.

The number of banks that didn't make their monthly dividend payments on TARP funds skyrocketed to 29 in August, up from 18 in May. Banks can choose not to make payments during a given month, allowing the dividends owed to accumulate unpaid. Failure to pay may be a sign of financial distress. Obviously banks that are short of capital may decide to retain funds rather than pay off the TARP. [Source: The Business Insider]

Try this sometime: Tell your bank you can't make the mortgage payment this month because you're short of capital on, say, the grocery bill, and you need to retain funds. Next, get a stopwatch and time how soon it takes the bank to begin foreclosure process on your address.

Easy bet - it'll be faster than you can say "too big to fail".

Those titans that have emerged from the post-9/15/08 wreckage to be our new Croesean Overlords of Amercan Finance have been trumpeting their own swift TARP repayment schedules, although, oddly, none have fully repaid. The May "stress test" didn't exactly show the banking sector booming back after the meltdown, muting boasts by Goldman Sachs and other banks that they'd pay off the government money real, real soon. BB&T's yappy self-congratulation that it's on the verge of making it's final repayment installment has been repeated so long it's been relegated to the "believe it when I see it" cellar, along with bug-eyed alien anal probers and an NFL team for L.A.

Truth is, it may never be paid back. As Robert Reich points out today, Wall Street's current boom is nothing more than a Ponzi facade, a flimsy rally boosted temporaily by cheap money and shrinking overhead caused by... job cuts. That's right, the brokers are toasting unemployment lines as short-lived boon. But when the companies continue shrinking because jobless consumers can't buy their gimcracks, the high-rolling pyramid scheme will fall flatter than Bernard Madoff's credit rating.

The market coughs, the banking industry catches a cold, and we taxpayers come down with cholera.

In Senate testimony last month, TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky said,

Treasury is unlikely to get back the full amount of money lent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program despite a recent spate of repayments from large banks... The program "played a significant role" in rescuing the financial system from a meltdown... But it was "extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment," according to his prepared testimony.

(Yale Finance Professor William Goetzmann) said "The intent of TARP investment was not that it was a great investment for the U.S. taxpayer," Goetzmann said. "The intent was to save the U.S. financial system, and that was going to cost some money." He said he expected to see differences in repayment emerge among banks of different sizes. Larger banks such as Goldman Sachs, which returned $10 billion in TARP money in July, are all likely to pay back the money fairly soon, but Goetzmann warned that many smaller banks may end up defaulting on their obligations.

Thirty years ago, the federal government began taking caps off interest rates to help American banks recoup losses they'd racked up the previous decade making bad loans to shaky foreign nations. Our banks were left holding the bag when those countries - many of them our banana-republic "allies" - defaulted. But with cooperation of visionary leaders in Washington, the sorry sack was passed to consumers in form of now-legal loanshark "vigorish". Forcing those least likely to afford such a burden the "obligation" of underwriting bad decisions by overpaid, larcenous jackasses has a long, storied history as permanent fixture in American essentia.

Now, big players in the financial industry can go directly to the public till to cover losses, this time for the crap-game "instruments' they sold and couldn't redeem. There are more shoes left to fall, more losses to be posted.

Get ready to be squeezed some more.