JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) and the U.S. government can't seem to agree what the bank's stock warrants are worth. As a result, JPM has asked the Treasury Department to auction off the warrants publicly in order to determine a fair market price.

The JPM warrants were issued to the government under the terms of its TARP loan. Bailed-out banks have the option to repurchase their own warrants, but only if they can strike a deal with the feds regarding a reasonable price. However, many firms have complained that the Treasury is seeking too high a price for the assets -- putting executives in the awkward position of claiming that their stock just isn't worth that much.

In choosing the auction alternative, JPMorgan is waiving its right to repurchase its own warrants (it could potentially bid through the public auction process, but company executives have decided not to do so). If the stock warrants are successfully auctioned off to a third party, their exercise would be dilutive to existing shareholders.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says now that most banks have raised capital, maybe it'll help the FDIC dole out assets of the losers.

Can I just say that I don't care about the public-private investment program? It was a good idea before the stress tests and would have been excellent if all of these banks hadn't raised capital.

But they have.

So now we have to struggle with the notion of the program's relevance. It can be used as a cleanup program for some companies that desperately want to sell down assets to clean up their books, but with the capital raises, none of the major banks should be interested in selling into it.

From this writer's observation, it seems that we have two US economies. One economy is doing just fine. The people in this group have money. They are living well, eating out frequently and buying pretty much what they want.

Then we have a second economy made up of the unemployed and persons living on the edge of disaster. Here we see a growing number of credit card and home equity delinquencies. These people are in a downward spiral. Having lost their jobs, they are using credit cards to survive. This leads to double trouble -- no money and default on credit card debt and home mortgage.

Why does Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) earn so much money trading equities? The answer lies in a proprietary set of secret codes that Goldman uses when making their trades. In the first quarter of this year Goldman raked in $2 billion dollars from its equity trading and is the leading trader on Wall Street. Even the venerable JPMorgan Chase & Company (NYSE: JPM) only made $1.8 billion.

Now a Russian, named Sergey Aleynikov, who previously worked for Goldman is accused of stealing Goldman"s secret codes. These codes are the property of Goldman and enables them to do high speed and high volume trades in various stock and commodity markets.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the rally here seems too strong for the news and data we're getting.

Just as when Doug Kass says, "Tell me something I don't know," I think this market knows something we don't know, either about a turn in commercial real estate to rival that of residential -- the real estate investment trusts are holding in well -- or a second stimulus plan, a real one that will put more people to work.

The employment numbers aren't good enough to merit this kind of rally, and we know the layoffs for June were preposterously high. We know that the auto build will be slightly better than expected a few months ago, but it's still pathetic and the auto idlings are about to start.

In a word: yes.

Despite all the talk about regulating these speculative investment vehicles, "Obama's financial overhaul plan included no big surprises or threats to the lucrative, secretive industry," writes The Wall Street Journal.

The name of the game is lobbying, which is easily funded by the $1.3 trillion dollar industry. Even after numerous Ponzi schemes and frauds have recently been exposed, the U.S. government has failed at regulating hedge funds, the most speculative area in finance, in part due to the industry's lobbying efforts.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says stock prices may roll back, but techs and financials should be fine.

The pain of the aftermath of mark-ups never goes away. We knew what was in store for us, as the mark-up folks don't like to play on the last day, especially with the newly vigilant Securities and Exchange Commission. I have to believe that this SEC will now become more interested in "the tapes," which would show clients asking brokers to take stocks up as much as they can, something that we know is against the law.

What comes up from mark-up must come down, and the most important "come-downs" should be in the industrials, because we have the least visibility in them. I do not believe the techs have as much to worry about, nor the banks, because both have excellent earnings prospects for the coming quarter. Why sell Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) (Cramer's Take) here? Why sell Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) (Cramer's Take)? And why dump Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) (Cramer's Take) or Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) (Cramer's Take) or JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) when those have the best possibilities of good news ahead? I can see locking in some Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) (Cramer's Take) gains, but that's going to be the best quarter of all.

Mergers and acquisitions aren't delivering the fees that investment bankers used to enjoy, but fortunately, the money's coming from elsewhere. Data from Thomson Reuters reports a 29% increase in capital markets and M&A fees for the first time in more than a year. Share sales (e.g., rights offerings) were where dealmakers found the action. In the shrinking M&A space, Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) has taken the lead spot.

Since there are fewer banks in the marketplace than there were a year ago -- and they have less money -- the capital is starting to come from elsewhere. Because they aren't lending at their previous pace, companies are issuing bonds and equity to replenish their coffers. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), for example, raked in more than $23 billion from the bond market to fund its acquisition of Wyeth (NYSE: WYE), and Roche nabbed Genentech with the help of a $30 billion debt issuance.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the endless worries will prove bogus, and jobs creation could spur a real lift.

Alt-A. Endless bank foreclosures. Commercial real estate. These are the big three worries that will not be killed by data, rigor or common sense, no matter what happens.

Doesn't it occur to anyone that there already should have been a big spike in commercial real estate losses by now? That the decline in the economy has lasted long enough that it should have manifested itself? Doesn't anyone think that there should have been a big commercial real estate bad-debt bump at a Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) or a JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) or a Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) (Cramer's Take)?

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the bank has the least to worry about and can gain from new federal regulation.

Sometimes you just have to step back from the small-picture hubbub and make some assumptions about the new landscape if legislation passes.

If you look at the health care legislation you know that it is going to cut out some profitability for companies that have relied on the government for big profits, which means the companies that have the most Medicare exposure. So you go with the health maintenance company with the least Medicare exposure -- WellPoint (NYSE: WLP) (Cramer's Take). It simply can't get hit as badly as a Humana (NYSE: HUM) (Cramer's Take) or a UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH) (Cramer's Take) because it doesn't have the exposure.

Will derivatives be eventually regulated? At the moment, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are drafting legal language to submit to Congress on the details of regulating the derivatives markets. Just which agency will take the lead in overseeing these markets is not clear at this writing. The SEC is the older of the two agencies.

There had been some talk about merging the two agencies, but political pressure has all but ruled this out. It now looks like they will share the oversight responsibilities.

This morning, the U.S. Federal Reserve is expected announce that some banks will be allowed to repay the money lent to them under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Some of the banks expected to receive approval are Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), American Express (NYSE: AXP), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), State Street (NYSE: STT) and U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB). All of these banks have expressed interest in repaying the government.

What is interesting is that there will be yet another Czar joining the White House, a "Repayment Czar," (what is the deal with the media's fascination with Russian royalty?) or as the administration will call the position, the "Special Master for Compensation."

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says Mutual Fund Monday is alive and well.

Here we go: Bias says sell off. Time for a selloff. After being up for nine out of 11 weeks, it's time we went down. We should go down because we don't know what's going to happen, and Europe's down, and oil's down. Housing's awful and rates are going the wrong way for housing.

Next we are going to hear the whole move was phony, that only a handful of banks -- maybe just JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) and Goldman (NYSE: GS) (Cramer's Take) -- can pay back TARP -- and that the banking system is still weak and will remain weak because the recovery will be weak.

In running a very tight stock screen recently for value plays Burlington Northern Santa Fe (NYSE: BNI) showed up on a list of 14 stocks. Interestingly all the large railroad stocks did. This reminded me of several stories I have done on the subject, the most recent being Chasing Value: Watch BNI -- the heck with Citigroup.

To summarize, about six weeks ago a Citigroup (NYSE: C) analyst declared it was time to sell the stock when BNI was trading in the mid $60s -- I said investors should do the opposite, it was a great value. Friday the stock closed at $76.98. Even at this price it is a value and ever more so with oil prices steadly creeping up.

Well, now it seems that even the big boys have to play by the rules. What do I mean play by the rules? Apparently, if a bank wants to pay back the TARP monies, they must demonstrate that they can raise equity.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) and American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) were the only two banks that did not raise equity.

So there was an exchange between regulators and Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's chief executive, who said that he did not believe that ability to tap capital markets should have been relevant for his bank. He went on to say, "Any argument you can think of, you could assume we made with our regulators. And as you could also expect, they won.The primary reason was access to equity capital markets, and its hard for me to imagine that really applies in the JPMorgan case." So it seems that the exchange was spirited to say the least.