Maybe I’m eating too much Matzoh which is clogging the part of my brain that triggers the "trust" center but I’m not feeling great about this aspect of the government’s effort to conduct "stress tests" on the banks:

But the tests, which are expected to be completed by the end of this month, are being conducted out of public view. Federal law prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of the results of any bank examination, including the stress tests. Some investors wonder if the new tests are rigorous enough, given the potential problems lurking inside the banking industry.

   So, let me get this straight: we, the taxpayers, who were already mislead about what regulators and the Treasury Secretary knew about the bonuses at AIG, who seem to be given new information each week about yet another problem in the financial system that we didn’t know about before–we cannot get the results of the bank examinations because the process is being done in secret. The basic conclusion is that we are supposed to trust what the examiners find.

   The problem is that there are too many people in the mix who seem to come from the same culture–Wall Street and the financial sector generally–who know each other and want to protect each other. How do trust the results of a secret examination, which will, then, no doubt be used to come back to us, the taxpayers, and ask for more money to bailout the banks?

   Well, maybe next week when bread returns to the table things will clear up for me and I will be hit with a new surge of trust. I doubt it.