The count down continues – Bears Stearns, Northern Rock, Indy Mac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch and so on and so forth. In our own eyes, hundreds of years of experience are thrown into the trashcan of greed.

Before the financial Katrina is over, nobody can predict how many Wall Streets financial entities will still be standing.

While tears are being shed across the globe on the financial implications of these falls, it is important to remember what really happened here. It wasn’t that subprime loans failed these established institutions. That was just the symptom.

Here is what actually happened: For years, America’s best brains have been running into Law Schools and Business Schools where they are taught how to expand the frontiers of capitalism, leaving sciences to foreigners and their foreign-born children.

These MBA graduates from the best universities in America devised complex financial products which they sell to the rest of the world. Operating under a government that disliked regulating any aspect of the free market, these smart people had free rein. They hid risk from investors and finally from themselves- and hence the dramatic fall.

When the first sign emerged, when little people- victims of these sophisticated frauds were losing their homes, cars and credit facilities, the government ruled out any form of bailout. The government tagged these hurting people speculators who made bad investments. From Capital Hill to the Rose Garden, Republican leaders called them irresponsible.

Then it hit the first investment bank, Barnes Stearns, and the government rushed in with billions of tax payers’ money to rescue it claiming that if the government didn’t the whole financial system would collapse in a domino effect.

As the fallout continued, out of embarrassment, the government gave up on using tax payers’ money to bail them out financial institutions.

It is now left to be seen how all these will play out. As stakeholders throw out solutions and how to correct the mess, it is important to think about rounding up these smart people who set up these deceptive financial products.

Such is needed to ensure that they do not reincarnate at other outfits to continue from where they stopped. Another reason to go after them is to interrupt their good lives at tax-sheltered Islands across the globe while the rest of us, little people, get stuck bearing the burden of this mess they made.

Those who screamed that Main Street China should be punished for producing dangerous toys and contaminated food products must now scream that Wall Street America be made to pay for its contaminated, defective and deceptive financial products.

Greed is good, Wall Street once declared. It is time to remind Wall Street that greed also has consequences.