Jim:    This was no normal day...  this was one of the ugliest days that I have ever seen in my career, with billions and billions of dollars of losses in the financial stocks...  Oh, heck, in every stock...  and it seems like there is no end in sight.

And I found myself challenged to think, can we work our way out of this?  How do we do it?  Can it be done?...

The only way I can think of to find our way out of this mess, is to look at how we got in it in the first place...

Monumental outrageous and stupid...  Self-interested and self-absorbed...  Simply unwilling to believe that anyone else could be right...  So sure of his company's future, as to be unable to see the destruction and rot from within...   In my view, these are all the traits that define Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, all the way down.

Fuld simply passed up opportunity after opportunity after opportunity... to save his firm.

Now, I believe it was that arrogance that brought down his once-great company...  even after he had done so much to build it into a great place...  despite being among the worst issuers of bad mortgages...  people forget that...  right along with Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch... Fuld's Lehman Brothers was one of the most opaque financials I have ever seen.   I could not understand... or have any idea of how much exposure they really had...

You know, at a time when honesty and transparency are clearly the best policy...  we know that, because that's what saved Merrill Lynch...  Lehman Brothers, under Dick Fuld, was so opaque, that we still don't know what the company holds...  even though we know it's finished.  It was a big holder of bad paper.  That's really all we know...

I can't describe how horrible his stewardship was during this difficult period...  how many jobs he cost people, how much money... how much heartache...  words are failing me here.

I can't believe how he thought the old boy network would prevent this destruction from happening, but it seems like he did...

Unlike John Thain who did everything he could to save the Merrill Lynch he inherited, and only gave his shareholders a better price than I think they deserved, with this sale to Bank of America (BAC), Fuld did nothing...  I really mean nothing... nothing... to put out the fire...

Tonight, Dick Fuld will become the 18th person to be removed from the Wall of Shame, since we've started it...

11 were fired from this board, or resigned, 3 were pardoned, and 3 were taken off when they were moved to positions where their inefficiencies couldn't do as much harm.

But none of them... not one... will hold this particular distinction. No. Dick Fuld comes down from the Mad Money Wall of Shame, not because he's been outsted, not because he's been pardoned... but because, in my view, he drove his company into bankruptcy.

At the same time, John Thain, of Merrill Lynch, comes off the Wall... because he has redeemed himself. The contrast between these two CEOs and how they led their firms... well, it couldn't be more stark.

I am personally mortified by Lehman's demise under the tenure of Dick Fuld. I believed in the guy... I wasn't his friend, but I wasn't his foe... and I thought he was going to turn things around after I went to see him not that long ago... 40 points ago... But, in retrospect, it appears I was wrong. The only thing worse than being on the Wall of Shame is being taken off, because you no longer have a company to run.

Now that Lehman has collapsed, it's time to ask who else could follow Dick Fuld...

Well, I told you who was going to follow him. How about AIG?...

This was a firm that, when the stock was at $60 bucks, said it had $500 million of exposure to bad loans. It turned out it had... well, I don't know... let's just say a lot more than that...

Like Lehman, I urged AIG to take action when it could... First, I put Marty Sullivan on the Wall of Shame... a guy who was just way over his head as the CEO of AIG... And then, I threatened just last week, when AIG - now at $4.76 - was still in the $20s... to put his replacement, Robert Willumsted, on the list, if he didn't raise capital.

Well, the weekend after a precipitous haircut, or perhaps beheading, he's burned capital, because he didn't want to sell the firm too cheaply. Oh great... In my opinion, the man's a fool... another one of these guys like Fuld, who we were supposed to worship, because of their long resumes and their years in the trenches.

I have had enough of all this and so have you... The disgraces, the denial about their companies, the lack of accountability... We're sick of it, right. We're sick of it...

Robert Willumsted, welcome to the Wall of Shame...

Why did all this happen?... Why was Merrill able to get a bid, and a pretty darn good one, while Lehman didn't? And AIG is now struggling to stay afloat?...

To me, the answers are simple... Those winning companies are transparent. The losing companies have no transparency; we don't really know what they're worth.

Merrill's financials represented, in the end, a specific depiction of the company's assets, after a huge writedown in capital raised in July. Although I didn't like the way Thain did it - how he merited the Wall of Shame - by assuring us he didn't need capital, and then raising it - at least he did the right thing by the new shareholders who got in at $22 bucks...

Lehman told you next to nothing about its financials. I went over them again this weekend, and I couldn't believe how little you could find. AIG just seems to have sent you on a wild goose chase. It was apparently still totally wrong about its massive exposure to bad mortgages. I put this thing on the Sell Block in the $60s. The company was all over me like a cheap suit, telling me I didn't know what I was doing...

I don't have to tell you how I was right...

The SEC was complicit in not demanding the same financials it got from say ETFC or CIT... Those are good models, which shows you exactly what needs to be said... and serve as shining examples of the ability to quantify the problems that have bedeviled all these companies...

I believe that, if Lehman's financials were as transparent as E-Trade's, someone actually might have been willing to buy them... But, then again, the stuff would have been written down to a level where it was worth buying.

This is a truly disgraceful period in American capitalism... where Laissez Faire officials in governement remained ignorant of all the signs of destruction that were available in August of 2007, when I allegedly went crazy, and predicted these very failures, and these very layoffs...

When you combine an ill-informed, over-its-head Federal Reserve, with arrogant executives accountable to no one... who took on enormous risks with other people's capital... and add in an SEC that's said, sorry suckers... it's all Caveat Emptor (i.e., "buyer beware") from here, and allows companies to be a free firezone for the sellers, with no upticks and no naked shorting, then you get what... you get a down-500-point day... you get this Black Monday. That's what you get...

So, let me ask you something...

Where the heck is the outrage?...

Why am I the only one that's furious here? I ain't that special...

But the silence and the respect for people like Dick Fuld and Robert Willumsted... to me, aren't worth respecting... that silence and respect, that's everywhere...

Now, listen... I don't come from business world... I come from the sports world... I was a sports writer... Every one of these CEOs and government officials I've criticized would never have survived the scrutiny of the media or the fans in the sport world...

How the heck can that be a more straightforward world than this one?... How can NFL gambling feel more reliable than these markets?

It beats me...