RJ and Makay

Just two weeks ago, it looked for sure like Goldman Sachs would be crowned the number one M&A dealmaker of 2010. But Morgan Stanley nipped them at the tape.

Morgan Stanley finished the year with 356 M&A deals worth a combined $594.6 billion, according to investment banking facilitator Dealogic. Second-place finisher Goldman Sachs completed 346 deals worth $580.6 billion. Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan finished a distant third and fourth place, respectively.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner stood before a recent town hall meeting and offered a eulogy for the government's $700 billion bank bailout program, which expired last week, two turbulent years after Congress approved it during the heat of the financial crisis in 2008.

Geithner noted that Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, had been called un-American and a deliberate departure from free market principles. Even though there is still a chasm between the perceptions of the program and its overwhelmingly favorable effect on the U.S. economy, economists largely agree that the massive federal bailouts beginning in 2008 saved the country from a financial abyss.

Yesterday, KPMG released the findings from a survey of 134 CEOs and C-level execs in the banking and financial services industry. The survey covered a variety of topics including views on further improvement in business conditions, employment picture, investing in growth, expectations of further write-downs and bank failures expected, other regulatory developments deemed likely, and investment management findings.

The survey results are pretty interesting.

Here are the bullets about the findings:

90 percent of the banking and financial services executives believed…