This must be the day when everything gets sewn up into neat little packages. The Greek government has announced a deal has been reached to secure their second bailout, though one junior partner has not confirmed agreement. The head of the European Central Bank is saying a deal has been done as well.

Greek bailout talks have deadlocked again, but at the moment the culprit is not the hedge funds seeking a higher payout on the distressed debt they bought, but the “troika” of the EU, ECB and the IMF. They gave Greece a Monday deadline to accept bailout terms. And those terms, frankly, are totally insane.

Along with Dean Baker and a few others, I’ve been fighting a lonely crusade against those who insist that TARP “made money.” In a new report, the GAO faults Treasury for constantly shifting the goalposts on how they report that “profit” from TARP. It’s a slightly different argument, but one that highlights how this illusion of a successful TARP lies in manipulation of the numbers.

If European banks need $154 billion in cash to meet new capital requirements and backstop losses on sovereign debt, and investors are unlikely to be a source for raising cash, then banks really have nowhere else to turn except their national governments. And that may get problematic in a hurry.

The 17 countries of the Eurozone formally backed a new deal for fiscal management, one designed to “save the euro” but which can only help if a host of other measures fall into place, including any plan to actually boost growth on the southern periphery.

The new plan to save Europe includes a condition that, says Felix Salmon, private bondholders cannot take losses on any future eurozone bail-outs. This is merely an invitation for recklessness by the bondholders, with a giant safety net put under them by Europe.

We have a better sense of the situation in Europe, or at least the game being played by Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank, in tandem. Merkel and the ECB, before acquiescing to any scheme involving Eurobonds or running the printing presses, want to tighten fiscal integration among Eurozone countries, with the attendant loss of national sovereignty and real penalties for breaking fiscal guidelines.

Most of what James Theckston describes is familiar – the financial incentive (and pressure from his corporate parent) for lenders to sign up subprime borrowers, even to those who qualified for prime loans; the racial and ethnic biases exposed by preying on the weak or uneducated; the unfairness of bailing out those Wall Street banks and doing nothing for the homeowners whose lives were ravaged.

One of the ways in which the big banks were bailed out was through an artificially high credit rating based on the assumption that they would always get bailed out if they got into trouble. This was a major advantage for them over their competitors. Now S&P Rating Services is downgrading major banks.

Six central banks took coordinated action to ensure liquidity for the global banking system. The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland will provide lending of dollars to banks to ensure they can cover operations.