Yes, Chairman Mao, that's true. But sometimes there's reassurance when there's no clarity. As long as there's reassurance, who cares where it came from?

If you took a stress test like the ones the banks just took, you could have dropped dead on the treadmill and the government still would have declared you healthy.

But the tests, which supposedly made many banks testy and pissed off at the government, seem to have worked for now ("How the Stress Tests Stopped the Market Bleeding"), even though we know that they were little more than a game.

Mark Gongloff carries the medical metaphor a step further in this morning's Wall Street Journal by noting that "for all the excitement about improving financial markets, most are still on some form of government life support."

As for the stress tests, well, there was as much voodoo as traditional medicine in play there. See Saturday's WSJ piece "Banks Won Concessions on Tests" for confirmation of earlier suspicions ("Cheaters always win: Citi, BofA already flunked 'stress' tests; they're just doing them over," May 5, "Spinning out of control on the banks' stress tests," May 7, and "Banks get passing grades -- at least in how they spun the stress tests," May 8).

One of the best spinners is Howard Atkins, chief financial officer at Wells Fargo, who was quoted over the weekend by the Financial Times (U.K.) as saying, "Left to our own devices, we are hopeful we would be allowed to start paying back [TARP] soon."

Since when has Wells Fargo been left to its own devices — except when it came to doing over its stress test?

The bank's been sucking the government's teat for so long. Last October 29 (as I pointed out last month), Atkins proudly announced, ""The combination of the market capital and the capital investment from the government will enable us to finance the Wachovia acquisition."

And Wachovia, as it turned out, was responsible for a huge chunk of the bank's record $3 billion profit during the first quarter of 2009. Atkins said last month that Wachovia accounted for 40 percent of that record-breaking revenue.

Yet Wells Fargo whines about the stress tests. Hey, relax, we're still taking care of you.