While many potential presidential candidates are courting major banks for donations, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who insists she isn't running for president, is giving it to Wall Street but good.

In a New York City speech Monday, she said she's not too worried that her crusade against big banks will hurt Democratic candidates, CNNMoney reports.

Some banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss urging Democrats to soften their stance against big banks, Reuters reports.

While they did not discuss in the meeting whether to withhold donations to Senate Democrats because of Warren's anti-Wall Street crusade, the idea has been raised in one-on-one discussions, according to Reuters.

"I believe it's a serious threat," Warren said in the speech. But she's undaunted. "It is so brazen. If they think they can say in public, 'I don't like your tone, I don't like the way you talk about financial regulation' . . . I got news for them: bring it on."

Her only concerns about Wall Street are that banks shouldn't be able to cheat their customers, and too big to fail financial institution shouldn't be able to wreak havoc on the economy, Warren said. "If they want to fight on either one of those, I'm ready."

Meanwhile, though bank stocks may have underperformed the overall stock market during the past year, they represent an attractive investment now, says ace bank analyst Dick Bove of Rafferty Capital Markets.

"If you look at bank stocks within the past 12 months, what you can see is that the KBE, the ETF [exchange-traded fund] that relates to banking stocks, is down about 4 percent in a period in which the stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 is up 9.50 percent," he tells CNBC.

But the lagging performance of bank stocks doesn't reflect any fundamental problems with the banks' business, Bove argues. Book values, dividends and earnings are rising, except for those banks with litigation expenses

And, "if you look at 2015, all three of these things are going to be up again," he notes. "The question is when will investors get comfortable enough with the banking industry to start buying stocks again, because from a fundamental standpoint these stocks are unbelievably cheap."

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