Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- On Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama spoke to a well-heeled group nibbling on lamb chops and apple tart at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan. He might as well have been at the Mirage in Las Vegas.

For these guests, the casino that is banking is back in full swing. Goldman Sachs among others is making record profits rolling the dice where the house wins if the gamble pans out and the taxpayer loses if not. Goldman is set to pay bonuses as great or more than those before the bust, taking risks that got us into the mess along the way.

To listen to the Obama administration is to think that taxpayers are whole, their money returned (with interest!), the economy roaring and the wizards of Wall Street humbled and chastened.

To the contrary, Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general keeping watch over the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said only hours after Obama left the podium that just 17 percent of the TARP money has been repaid. “It’s extremely unlikely that taxpayers will see a full return on their investment,” he said.

What does “extremely unlikely” mean, that someday we’ll reach 20 percent? In an interview afterward, Barofsky said it would be a stretch to think “we’ll get a lot of our money back at all.”

At his fundraiser, Obama got a reasonable return on his investment -- about $2 million, though the welcome was far from effusive. Nervous chuckles greeted his plea for a cease-fire in the regulation wars.

Pretty Please

“If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms,” Obama said. “Don’t fight them. Join us.”

Where’s the “pretty please”? His top aides blanketed last Sunday’s talk shows, speaking as if they had been wound up by an anger czar to express belated outrage at banks.

What comes through in Barofsky’s 256-page report released yesterday is that Obama took up coddling the banks where the Bush administration left off, with many of the same people doing the coddling.

Other industries like the drug manufacturers and carmakers have to beg and make concessions to get a break from regulators. Not so banks. They are in a higher priesthood, speaking an ancient language in secret ceremonies that no one else understands. Don’t ask, don’t tell, they instruct one Treasury secretary after another in Aramaic and Washington listens.

Candor Among Secretaries

Barofsky’s report said that Treasury officials -- that means former Secretary Henry Paulson and successor Timothy Geithner -- fueled public anger and suspicion with their “less- than-accurate” statements about how the nine large banks that got money were chosen, and by not requiring banks to report how they used the rescue money.

Geithner bought the line that bonuses promised in employment contracts had to be paid to executives who caused the crisis, as if contracts aren’t renegotiated every day. Especially when there’s no money to honor them.

And don’t think the banks are lending money they got from the government. The way they are making their profits is the same way that led to the financial crisis -- wheeling and dealing in dark trading operations that move money from one place to another, yielding huge momentary profits but producing no loans to business or jobs.

Obama said yesterday that to get lending moving, he is going to have to send money to the small banks that weren’t too big to fail.

Old Ways

Rather than join efforts to prevent a repeat of last fall’s meltdown, as Obama gently requested, the finance industry has deployed a swarm of lobbyists to the Capitol to keep the old ways intact. Even though some banks claimed they didn’t want the bailout money and couldn’t wait to pay it back, the banks needed TARP -- notwithstanding Goldman’s stunning assertion that the billions it got through the bailout of American International Group Inc. made little difference to its financial well-being.

Back then, just about any conditions could have been demanded by Washington, from limiting outrageous compensation to insisting that helicopter hats be worn when testifing on Capitol Hill.

There still could be conditions imposed, Barofsky said. A big opportunity was missed in March 2009 when roughly $30 billion more in government money was being put in place to prop up AIG. There will be another now that $198 million has been set aside for bonuses. Barofsky said he’s counting on pay czar Kenneth Feinberg to take action.

Hail Inequality

At a conference in London, a Goldman international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company sets aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths counseled the rest of us to be understanding. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said.

Are you listening, Mr. President? Not since the fictional Gordon Gekko said “Greed is good” has there been a more blatant statement about the ethos of the Masters of the Universe.

You would hope we’d get something for several trillion dollars -- some remorse and a promise not to do it again. The bankers are clear-eyed realists. If you get a huge payout when you take a risk that works out and a huge payout when the risk doesn’t, why would you change your behavior? You don’t stop doing something that feels so good.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 21, 2009 21:00 EDT