Granted, this headline is deceiving like looking at your portfolio and only counting the performance of the stocks that are actually in the green is deceiving, but the banks can at least hold their heads a bit higher on this news:

The US Treasury has so far made more than $10bn on banks’ repayments of bail-out funds, according a study by consults SNL Financial. As the FT reports, the authorities have seen an annualised return of 8.5 per cent on the $250bn injected into banks at the height of the crisis as Goldman Sachs and American Express, in particular, paid favourable prices to buy out warrants received in return for government aid.

This counts only the 49 banks that have returned their TARP dollaz, which are, naturally, the strongest. The 28 undercapitalized lenders still in the program may turn out to be another story, along with the AIG money pit and the automobile industry, so we hope Treasury doesn’t run out and buy a bunch of bottles of Krug to celebrate the selloff of their stake in $C or anything.