Keeping track of who’s paying back.

UPDATE (April 21, 2009): Yesterday morning, the TCF Financial Corporation (TCB) of Wayzata, Minnesota was cleared by the Treasury to return $362 million in TARP money. That's double down on funds repaid, and bumps the pool up to a little more than 0.1% of the TARP total. Way to go Wayzata bankers!

To catch up on what the TARP-o-Meter is all about, read below:

(April 15, 2009) Ever drive by your local church or United Way office and see one of those huge motivational thermometers, showing just how far the community has to go before it meets its big goal? At TBM, that’s kind of how we feel about the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. With all those hundreds of billions of dollars doled out to the poor, deserving banking sector, we, along with patriotic leaders like Goldman Sachs, would like to see every penny restored to the taxpayer, and soon.

So, here’s our newest bailout tracking feature—the TARP-o-Meter. Going forward, we’ll use the TARP-o-Meter to display just how much money publicly funded banks have returned to Treasury coffers.

So far, only a handful of smaller banks that received TARP money have paid back their debts, totaling a meager $353 million, about .05 percent of the $700 billion allocated for the bad-asset-gobbling government program.* Yesterday, another midsize institution pledged to repay $184 million by selling public shares. As far as the bigger players, Goldman Sachs has promised to raise capital to pay back its $10 billion TARP handout, hoping to become the first megabank in line to buck the oversight that came with the loan.

Red represents the money that’s been returned. Pink is the money that’s been pledged to be paid back someday. Needless to say, there’s not a lot of green. So come on, TARP banks! Get that number up there!

*Correction (Apr. 20, 2009): Originally this article misstated the percentage of TARP funds paid back. The number is .05 percent not .0005 percent.