So after all that buildup, the results are meaningless?

Bank stocks may have been on a tear lately, but the government is still concerned about the fragility of banks. And the new worry is that this latest effort to instill confidence may undermine it instead.

When the stress test was first conceived, it was never clear whether the results would be made public. But within days of the government’s announcing the test, lawyers inside the banks started to point out that, ahem, this may be material information, which means by law they have to disclose it to shareholders. (The drama over whether the Treasury Department had prevented Bank of America from disclosing the problems at Merrill Lynch was an added nudge.)

Now the results are going to be disclosed next Monday, though how much information will be made public is still hazy.

Some senior Wall Street bankers say they are beginning to worry that the results could cause a run on the weakest banks, no matter how forcefully the government cautions the public that the results have nothing to do with the viability of the bank. The broader sense of panic may have died down, but it’s not dead.

“I don’t want to be alarmist, but I’m worried next Monday could feel like September all over again,” said a chief executive I spoke with late last week who runs one of the 19 banks that underwent a stress test.