STAMFORD, Conn.

BECAUSE I RECENTLY published a novel about a banker’s promise (Telluride Promise), my editor at The Providence Journal asked me to examine how good a banker’s promise is today.

When you were in high school, necking in lover’s lane, do you remember one of the six biggest lies? Funny, none were about banker’s promises, although one was pretty close, “the check is in the mail.”

The original banker’s promise — when I take your money, I promise to give it back to you — created the theme for the novel I wrote. The massive breaking of that promise in the early 1930s created the tidal wave that led to creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Banking Act.

Today it seems as if a second kind of promise has evolved. When I take your money, I promise to put it to work productively. If memory serves correctly, we thought that led to TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program).

In the 1930s sort of case, the banker loses your money and says, “Sorry, I can’t give it back. You’re out your money.” In the second, the banker has lost your money, but you’re protected by the FDIC, and he says, “Sorry I can’t make any new loans because I don’t know how much I’ve lost.”

TARP was supposed to prop up failing banks and stimulate the economy. Somehow, the first half of the promise worked (we gave our money). And it did prop up failing banks (including Merrill Lynch and Wachovia).

But stimulating the economy has been a disaster. Large banks are not lending much. We see them sitting on their funds waiting for a better day while claiming not to be facing a demand for loans.

The bankers who took the TARP money and promised to get the economy restarted did so with their fingers crossed behind their backs. Since you can’t always see their hands, a closer look was needed. To be sure, not every banker should be painted with this broad brush. After all, only 19 took TARP funds (out of 1,031 banks with more than $500 million in assets, out of the total of 9,429 banks in the U.S.).

In any event, bank lending by large commercial banks (including TARP recipients) fell 2.3 percent from November 2008 to May 2009, while lending by small domestic commercial banks rose 5.6 percent over that same period, according to the Federal Reserve.

TARP appears mainly to have kept weak banks from failing and its funds appear mainly to have been used by large banks to maintain liquidity. TARP does not appear to be leading the way in restoring bank lending.

True, banks have been kicked around like soccer balls. People say: They lend too much and standards are too loose; they lend too little and standards are too tight. Banks have too little capital in part because their balance sheets have been distorted by government rules. Maybe it is even true the large banks were forced to take capital they didn’t want. It is certainly true that the ones who have hung around to be vilified and insulted by criminally uninformed congressmen who demand they work for nothing are not the bad guys from the truly failed institutions. The latter are basking on the beach with their severance packages.

Maybe there are subtleties in the giving of a banker’s promise. There is the promise that a banker will keep if it’s convenient. Everyone wants to keep a promise if it is convenient. Then there are promises bankers can’t keep. If asked, you’d be told that never happens; yet over the past decade the number of such broken promises has grown dramatically.

Not merely inconvenient. What we are talking about here is promises impossible to keep from the outset — for example, the whole field of derivatives investing. Such investments are based on a premise akin to an engineer secretly redefining the laws of aerodynamics. That will simply not keep the jumbo jet aloft. Scorn is the appropriate reward here, not excessive compensation. If you are among the people who promise something you know is impossible to deliver — or you do not even know it is impossible to deliver — you deserve scorn.

Look at the Government Accountability Office report of June 12. One sees that of the roughly $700 billion in TARP funds, about 48 percent has been disbursed and 60 percent ($200 billion) of that disbursed for “capital purchase” — throwing money at failing banks.

Of the roughly $430 billion that had been allocated to intervene directly in economic activity (such as the Consumer and Business Lending Initiative and Making Home Affordable programs) only 13 percent ($90.5 billion) had been disbursed and more than half of that had gone into the Detroit bailout.

What we have is the debasing of all promises made in our society.

A banker’s promise is as good as the banker is. The Treasury Department’s promise is as good as a bureaucrat is. And don’t forget Congress.

I have only two prescriptions: First, give the money directly to people. Let them save their homes and finance their companies. There will be losses, to be sure. Observation shows, however, that risks taken have resulted in greater gains than losses since, well, the creation of coin. Second, we should insist of our institutions and leaders that there be a very special kind of promise. The kind you keep.

W. Edward Massey ( edwardmassey@telluridepromise.com) is a long-time investment manager. His novel, Telluride Promise, was published this month. It is about a Colorado banker who went to jail for choosing to live up to his promises. It’s available on amazon.com.