Last summer, somebody put a bale of hay on a country intersection north of New York City, with this sign taped to it: “I got my bail out.” This kind of humor is a very mild example of the popular rage over the big bank bailout of 2008. People who don’t know bankers from Adam are furious about the bailout, necessary as it may have been to keep the economy from completely melting down.

The rather obvious reason is that nobody is getting bailed out except the financial companies that made the bailout necessary—the perpetrators of the derivatives and mortgage-banking atrocities that almost sunk this country. It goes against the grain. There’s something grotesquely unfair about it.

So today comes word that Citigroup, the nation’s largest financial holding company, has paid back its bailout funds. Citi’s reason for doing so is simple. Now that it’s out of the TARP program, it is no longer subject to strictures on executive pay, orchestrated by the stern-visaged pay czar Ken Feinberg. No sir! If the banks can’t pay their traders enough, they won’t be able to get their banks back into the same kind of exotic derivatives trading that got them in that mess in the first place. We can’t have that.

Citigroup’s stock was down sharply from almost the opening of trading, evidently because it has to raise $20 billion in capital, including common stock, to repay $20 billion to the Treasury. Stock hit notwithstanding, it would seem that Citi is back on its feet.

The exit of Citigroup from the TARP bailout program raises this question: What needs to be done now so that everybody, including the farmer with a sense of humor, gets some feeling of justice?

The most important step is obvious: The biggest banks simply must start lending again. They need to be forced to do so, because jawboning just isn’t working. As the New York Times reported yesterday, banks are keeping the purse strings shut tight on home refinancing, denying homeowners around the country the benefit of the record low interest rates on home mortgages..

President Obama certainly talks a good game—that’s his specialty, after all—but he hasn’t actually done anything to force the bankers to lend. During his weekly radio address on Saturday, he excoriated “the irresponsibility of large financial institutions on Wall Street that gambled on risky loans and complex financial products, seeking short-term profits and big bonuses with little regard for long-term consequences.” On Sunday he appeared on 60 Minutes and really let the bankers have it: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street."

Ouch! Those words must really sting. Why, I’ll bet that “fat-cat bankers” from Bedford to East Hampton must have laughed so hard that they fell down and hurt themselves.