Cramer on BloggingStocks: The Fed's push for TARP payback

Because with the exception of PNC, all of these banks act as if any minute there will be a gigantic offering and no one wants to get caught having bought some ahead of the offerings.

I can't blame them. These offerings have often gotten done down 20% from where they are announced but then once the deal is priced they fly.

With the overhang of the TARP, no one wants to take a chance that Wells Fargo, for example, is going to issue 25 million shares to get the job done the day after they buy it. So the buyers wait and the sellers don't sell because they figure they can just buy more or they believe the assurances that there will not be deals at these prices.

By getting the government out of the stocks, the companies will be trusted and their coffers can begin to build again.

They have been reluctant to do it in part because they think their stocks are too low. But that's a Mexican standoff. With the exception of PNC, which reported spectacular earnings, the earnings these other banks have put up aren't good enough to budge the sidelined bank investors.

But Treasury's insistence will change all of that.

This group's been horrible now for months, even as residential real estate has improved in the hardest-hit areas and many credit indicators have turned positive. One has to presume that it's the TARP money secondaries that have crushed the valuations.

Of course, the collapse last night in the Chinese bank shares doesn't help. It could cast a pall on these stocks beyond the TARP repayment plans. But the sooner the banks get them done the more likely they are to power higher in 2010.

Random musings: The New York Times is out with another article about how Amazon (AMZN) (Cramer's Take) and Wal-Mart (WMT) (Cramer's Take) are squaring off against each other. I reiterate that Amazon is a fraction of the online market and getting much bigger and the "war" is overblown on an earnings-per-share basis for Amazon.

Jim Cramer is co-founder and chairman of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer was long Bank of America and Wells Fargo.