Not at all. In fact, the banks that are getting $200 billion in TARP money from Treasury are also getting $336 billion in cheap loans from the FDIC and another $1 trillion in emergency loans from the Fed. They still want that FDIC and Fed money. How so? It gives them access to cheap capital and it comes with no strings attached. What could be better -- for the banks?

The government won't let any banks pay back the TARP unless all 19 pass the stress test and they all can pay back the TARP. If that happens -- and I doubt it will -- then all the banks will be on a level playing field. What some of the TARP recipients want is to pay back the money so they can take talent and customers from the ones that can't.

But this would leave the U.S. holding a big bag of toxic waste when the losing TARP-holders go bust. So to keep banks like Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) from paying back the TARP, the U.S. should put the same pay restrictions on the FDIC and Fed loans as it does on the Treasury cash.

If that happened, Goldman and its pals might be less eager to pay back that TARP money. Left to their own devices, the banks would gladly endanger the global financial system even more to benefit their top executives. Imagine from their perspective how great it would be if they could take talent and customers from their crippled competitors and leave the U.S. taxpayer to clean up the mess left by those competitors' ultimate collapse.

Does Wall Street still have too much power?

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.