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TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says he has no confidence in these hated names, and neither should you.

The financials are flying -- there are finally bids for most of them underneath. Many, including Lehman (NYSE: LEH) (Cramer's Take), are running. What a great time to put the negative cards on the table and put the negatives in perspective. That's right, let's look at the financial Achilles' heels. What could go wrong? In other words, here's the companion piece to Doug Kass' positive conversion. Here's what I am worried about even as Doug thinks everyone's too worried and the bottom is being put in.

To get started, let's look at what's not causing the endless declines in the stocks -- don't worry, we will get to the financial dirty dozen when I finish this preamble.

First, it ain't earnings. Earnings aren't going to be that great. But that's why the S&P is at 14 times. It can go to 12 or 11, or most likely stays at 13-14, but the E goes down (earnings).

Second, it ain't oil. The stocks sensitive to the increase in oil have room to go down, but the price of oil is being factored in slowly but surely.

Third, it isn't inflation or recession. Those two are being baked in each day.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says it'll be a huge, bizarre investment that sticks -- not a bid for Wachovia.

Why is there so much chatter about Wachovia (NYSE: WB) (Cramer's Take) getting a bid? Why do people think that its deposit base is worth the heartache of dealing with its mortgage portfolio?

We have all heard the chatter about a potential bid for Wachovia, and it sure would be sweet, because the stock has been one of the worst of the group. It doesn't have a CEO, so that fits the scenario of a company that could be for sale. The franchise was always a solid one until now. And I will admit that the secret to the bulls' case for a better second half is a bid for Wachovia, a premium bid that takes everyone's breath away and causes a short panic.

My problem is that if you wanted to buy Wachovia, why not wait? What's the hurry? Is it that you might miss a chance at a bottom? Is there someone else out there who might want it? Do you perceive a bidding war, for instance, between JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) (Cramer's Take) for WB? How about USB (NYSE: USB) (Cramer's Take)?

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says both oil futures and equity futures can move these hot issues.

Will the futures pull down the oil and gas stocks today? No, I don't mean the oil futures, I mean the equity futur

Last week when oil exploded, we caught two days of trading that dropped the stocks hard. We caught a bit of a bid in the nat gases like Chesapeake (NYSE:CHK) and Devon (NYSE:DVN) but at the end of the day, but the stocks were truly overwhelmed by the simple fact that they are in the indices.

This pattern has really held down the integrateds: last week Conoco (NYSE:COP) should have exploded, but it couldn't because it is such a big part of the S&P. Chevron (NYSE:CVX) and Exxon (NYSE: XOM) are no different.

The natural gas stocks are not as big a factor, but they can be rocked down without a problem.

I am not saying to avoid looking at the oil futures. They can control the stocks. I am saying that the equity futures tide can take down anything, even when the oil futures spike hard.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says this is a crucial moment for the dividend-payers, which should be getting support here.

You can't even find protection in yields these days. It just went away. Perhaps we will get it if Sen. Obama gets elected. Perhaps with higher rates. Perhaps with the downfall of the high-yielding American financials. (Nice discussion of the lack of dividend safety courtesy of the man who knows more about dividends than anyone, Dave Peltier, in the Columnist Conversation last week.)

For ages, it seemed you could get to a magic number, typically 4% yield, where stocks would bounce, or at least be given a parachute that opened for a gentle landing.

Last week that parachute failed. You have stocks like Con Ed (NYSE: ED) (Cramer's Take) just getting trashed here, pushing the yield to 6%. You have stocks like Weyerhauser (NYSE: WY) (Cramer's Take), Carnival Cruise (NYSE: CCL) (Cramer's Take), Gannett (NYSE: GCI) (Cramer's Take), just slicing through the protection. The former's got cyclicality, the middle's got consumer and fuel worries, and the latter is in secular. But they all have no trouble paying the dividend.

Or consider Verizon (NYSE: VZ) (Cramer's Take) and AT&T (NYSE: T) (Cramer's Take). The first is at a 5% yield, the other is almost there. No one questions their ability to support that dividend.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says forget calling a financial bottom -- everything you need is right in front of you.

Do you think this week will finally end the oil inventory nonsense? Do you think this week could be the breakout where oil doesn't trade on the slight build or the "heavier than expected" chatter?

I sure hope so.

Yesterday was a horrible market, but midday, when the market was really beginning to roll over, the whole complex turned. This was quite an achievement given the overwhelming collapse of the futures and the propensity of the bears to push things down.

Today with the futures breaching $140 -- remember, I think they're on the way to $150 -- we can see the error of relying on these numbers, which I have said for years now are meaningless. Witness how many times the inventories have been more full than expected and yet oil has doubled.

I want to go back to the cheaper-than-oil stocks, though. Natural gas. Oil has to go down $65 to get to where natural gas is right now. Meaning that historically oil trades at six times the price of natural gas. So natural gas -- forget the season, which is supposed to be bad for nat gas -- needs to come higher.

Much higher.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says with few exceptions, the landscape is littered with corpses.

Sell everything. Nothing's working. Revisit when the prices are adjusted for a big recession, soaring inflation and a crushed consumer. Sell at 12,000 and come back at 10,000. Even better: short it.

Are you going to argue with any of that? Do you have a case against it? What's the counter? Takeovers? We've had a couple: Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD) (Cramer's Take), Wrigley (NYSE: WWY) (Cramer's Take). Good if you owned them.

Lower rates? Can the Fed help? We assume the Fed is done. The odds favor higher rates. Bank turnarounds? How, with short-rates going up? With housing prices going down?

Can oil go down? Only with a worldwide crash, and with a worldwide crash, why would we come back at 10,000?

Can the consumer get more liquid? How? Unemployment's going higher. Wages won't go up in that environment.

That's the environment. It's pretty bulletproof when it comes to its logic.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says recent downgrades are killing whole industries, and they're coming at a terrible time.

You can't lose autos and aerospace. Yet that's what's happening. The devastating aerospace downgrade by Goldman yesterday had pin action galore, wrecking everything from United Tech (NYSE: UTX) (Cramer's Take) and Parker-Hannifin (NYSE: PH) (Cramer's Take) to BE Aerospace (NASDAQ: BEAV) (Cramer's Take). It took the whole frame down with it and made everything toxic. And it happens at a terrible time. It isn't like Honeywell (NYSE: HON) (Cramer's Take), which with a few days left in the quarter can come out defending itself. Goldman rolled a perfect strike.

And now the bowlers are back for more with an equally devastating "sell everything" call based on GM (NYSE: GM) (Cramer's Take). Once again it is seamless: Lear (NYSE: LEA) (Cramer's Take) and Tenneco (NYSE: TEN) (Cramer's Take) get jettisoned too, but you know that Visteon (NYSE: VC) (Cramer's Take) and American Axle (NYSE: AXL) (Cramer's Take) and Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) (Cramer's Take) and BorgWarner (NYSE: BWA) (Cramer's Take) -- the good ones! -- go down with the car.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says a do-nothing Fed signs the death certificate of the banks.

Time for the inflation hawks to recognize the stakes. Throughout the discussion as articulated in the papers and on TV, you hear of only two things with regard to the Fed, that the fundamentals are sound enough to stop cutting and that inflation worries command a shift to higher rates.

In the interest of understanding what has been happening in this market -- an unrelenting decline in all but the oil and fertilizer stocks since the Fed floated this stance -- you have to get your arms around the idea that this is it, an obituary, for all of the banks that need housing prices to increase and bad loans to decrease. Because despite the sound and quite cerebral approach the hawks are taking, unless we get a giant FHA bill out of Congress, you can pretty much be assured that most of the big banks in this country will be so radically under-reserved when they report that we might as well just give up on them.

How about that bill? It seems suddenly likely and it is important, I am not denying it. If we could get the FHA to have $300 billion in lending capacity and we agree that the FHA is basically going to have to take a beating, than you can make a case that we are only about a year away from a turn -- that was the tenor of the CSFB housing upgrade story yesterday, although it didn't rely on the FHA much at all in its prognostications.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the slide has to end somewhere -- eventually, we'll see a bid.

Is someone having a margin call? That's what I keep thinking as I watch the sickening slide in Motorola's (NYSE: MOT) (Cramer's Take) stock. How can Motorola go down so much? This is a company with a lot of money and some businesses that are doing excellently. It has great existing contracts with telcos.

But someone sells it and sells it hard every day. It almost feels that Carl Icahn has a margin call, post-Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) (Cramer's Take), or he has to sell MOT to fund Yahoo!, and that doesn't seem right.

Otherwise, how can we explain the endless selling? Sure, as Piper said yesterday, they are losing share in America, but does anyone think this company is going away? Does anyone think this company is some sort of regional bank with its destiny completely out of its hands, that reliance on housing coming back will determine its viability? This is only a $16 billion company now with sales that are almost twice that?

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says their products just don't have the demand to compete.

General Motors (NYSE: GM) (Cramer's Take) joins the list of unthinkables, the ones that may not be able to make it with its current structure. The ones that basically need to be Chapter 11'd to save the business from dying.

Typically there would be some price where the value guys come in, those suckers who buy things like Ambac (NYSE: ABK) (Cramer's Take) at $6 on a secondary, or Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) at $25 or Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) (Cramer's Take) at any price.

Typically there are big mutual funds with an inclination to say, "You know what? The market knows nothing about GM, and I want to buy it."

That isn't the case this time. I wonder if the value guys are running out of money.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the acquired Bear Stearns portfolio is worth even less than he thought.

How bad was that Bear Stearns portfolio? I am beginning to believe that JPMorgan's (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) buy of Bear is looking like a big mistake. It can only be justified by what might have been an even bigger problem for JPM -- the collapse of the trades that Bear made, which were being processed by JPM's clearing.

We are now beginning to get a real sense of the worthlessness of the mortgage portfolios. Not that we got any help from the SEC, which has taken a "we don't care what's in the mortgages as long as you tell us you have mortgages" attitude. That's been worthless for investors, and maybe even for JPMorgan.

The losses now exceed $400 billion, according to my modeling (if you simply assumed that 50% of the exotic mortgages that were issued from 2005 to 2007 eventually went into default). That's amazing, but it looks like I dramatically underestimated the losses. UNDERESTIMATED!

The most egregious issuers of these exotic mortgages were Bear, Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) (Cramer's Take) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) (Cramer's Take). I believe that JPM has taken in a huge number of uninsurable, non-hedgeable mortgage instruments that are a pure write-off. And that means they are probably underwater on everything they took in.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the oil powwow won't solve anything, but it will give you an opening in the stocks.

Today we learn that "dozens of world leaders and executives" are going to Saudi Arabia to find out how to lower oil prices this weekend.

Yep, there we go. Short the oil futures. They will no doubt come up with a plan that will produce much more oil and curtail its use, bringing oil down sharply -- perhaps to $100.

Yeah, right.

Weak dollar, speculators, funds indexed to commodities, intransigent Saudi Arabians, terrorist activities.

I believe that all of those factors combined have lifted oil by about $20. But that could be overstating things -- it's no more than that.

Because if there was a lot of oil, you would see those futures smacked down to levels where all sort of cockamamie ideas for oil alternatives would disappear. Right now, with oil at $130, we could produce an alternative from oil shale that would be bountiful and that has been the spare capacity that can be brought on in the next four years.

Other than that, forget about it.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says massive debt at the newspapers means they no longer work as businesses.

Maybe newspapers don't work as businesses. The shocking 10% workforce reduction announced this week by McClatchy (Cramer's Take) (NYSE: MNI), formerly the best-run chain out there, is a reminder that all of these companies have borrowed too much money and don't generate the cash flow to make it work. McClatchy, with an 8% yield, is showing signs of collapsing under its own weight, something that has been exacerbated by Wall of Shame performer Gary Pruitt, a man who is still, amazingly, the CEO.

But all of this was totally predictable. I have never seen an industry attract so many buyers with so much debt and so little equity.

Take Tribune (Cramer's Take). Sam Zell's a smart guy. He let the newspaper employees do the heavy lifting when he bought the Tribune company. That was so smart. He will be out very little if the deal fails. The workers will be out their retirement money. That was a smart deal -- unless you work there -- but I have spoken against that deal so many times I am sick of talking about it.

McClatchy could have weathered this downturn, instead of -- it is a bit unthinkable, but I think it will happen -- defaulting on its debt, if it hadn't been determined to buy a bunch of properties for much more than they are worth. The New York Times (Cramer's Take) (NYSE: NYT) and Gannett (Cramer's Take) (NYSE: GCI) spent a lot of money, but they didn't have to buy back stock. Gannett's 6% yield isn't tempting in the least.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says these stocks rise because they're doubly blessed. Integrateds fall because they aren't.

So many people have been puzzled why the major integrateds have not moved with the last $30 rally in oil's spot price. The answer?

They can't take advantage of it.

They either didn't believe, and therefore didn't drill, or they have been so in the crosshairs of sovereign lunacy that they haven't been able to. They didn't have the rigs or they judged that the rigs were so expensive that, like 1980, they would look like dopes when oil came back to $40-$50, where many thought it would. (Go back and check even last year's research for price targets, most of which were from the oil companies' themselves.)

Or maybe it didn't matter anyway. So many of the contracts these companies have signed with governments around the world are either being abrogated or just outright confiscated that you have to ask yourself "Who can invest under those scenarios?" Exxon (NYSE: XOM) (Cramer's Take) in Venezuela. Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) (Cramer's Take) and now BP (NYSE: BP) (Cramer's Take) in Russia. You can't continually invest billions and then write it off because the contracts you wrote don't mean anything.

Too many parties have too much to lose to let this one go through without a fight, TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says.

No, it is not over. If there is one thing we have learned about Sirius (NASDAQ: SIRI) (Cramer's Take)-XM (NASDAQ: XMSR) (Cramer's Take), it is that at every step of the way, people have to try to block it or at least hold it up to the point that someone goes out of business. This is a deal, now much longer in passing than Exxon and Mobil, that still has congressional meddling even right now, still has rearguard activists who might fight the merger on the commission itself even though the FCC's staff has said yes.

Lots of people are confusing the issue of the merger benefits with the merger itself. The benefits will be helpful down the road on both the revenue and the costs, and the caps won't mean that much. What matters, plain and simple, is refinancing. Both companies are always in danger of running out of money.

However, if you know that three years hence -- after the frozen period during which service fees cannot be increased -- the two companies can begin to offer extreme cable pricing, you can go hat in hand to the Street with a good bond deal that people will no longer feel could default.