When Congress enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program in October 2008, most Americans mentally wrote off the entire $700 billion as a loss.

Now, with the financial system beginning to recover, the ultimate cost to taxpayers is looking much smaller. And the big banks — the focus of the public's ire during the congressional debate — may not cost the Treasury much, if any, money when the program is finally wound down.

JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, US Bank and others already have repaid their bailout money, at a profit to Uncle Sam. Wells Fargo appears poised to do the same. The Treasury even has a paper profit of roughly $11 billion on its stake in Citigroup, which once was banking's biggest basket case.

Citigroup isn't yet in a position to repay the TARP money, and the Treasury couldn't sell its shares quickly without depressing the price. Still, a paper profit is much better than the black hole that taxpayers were staring into a year ago.

David Kemper, chief executive of Commerce Bancshares, asserted this week that the Treasury will essentially break even on its investments in traditional banks. The TARP will lose somewhere between $60 billion and $130 billion, he said in a speech at Washington University, but virtually all of that will be on nonbank investments. The money losers include the auto industry, insurer American International Group and finance company CIT Group.

Kemper also estimated that the government stands to lose all of the $200 billion it invested, outside of TARP, in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

With the biggest losses occurring outside the banking system, Kemper says it's unfair that banks have become a "whipping boy" for problems in financial markets. "There is a myth and there's a reality of what the bailouts have meant," he said.

Douglas Elliott, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says Kemper's TARP estimates appear to be in the ballpark.

"It's even conceivable, if you ignore interest costs, that we'll make a little money on the bank bailout," he said.

Separating bank and nonbank rescues isn't so easy, though. AIG was saved not because it's a big insurance company, but because big banks would have been imperiled if AIG couldn't stand behind its credit-default swaps. So perhaps the AIG losses — which Kemper estimates at $62 billion for the Treasury and Federal Reserve combined — should really be considered bank losses.

One thing that isn't in question is the wisdom of doing TARP in the first place. "It was worth risking a lot of money to prevent what could have happened," Elliott said.

Commerce was the third-largest U.S. bank to survive without taking TARP money, but Kemper acknowledges that the bailout was necessary. "In retrospect, TARP was a brilliant decision in terms of calming the markets and injecting capital," he said.

Of course, the big banks' ability to leave the intensive-care ward doesn't mean that the banking system is healed. We have had 115 bank failures so far this year, and they have cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $29 billion. Experts think we may see a couple of hundred more in the next two years, with the total cost perhaps approaching $100 billion.

But banks will pay that cost through higher deposit-insurance premiums, Kemper noted. Last Friday alone, nine bank failures cost the FDIC $2.5 billion. Kemper, calculating that Commerce would bear $4 million of that cost, quipped, "I don't think we made any money last week."