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First off, there is a lot more than 10.

My top 5 suspects is:

GATA (any company taking part in the gold scandal)
JP Morgan (leveraged derivatives at 750 to 1)
GE (mostly because of huge amounts of debt and potentially bad loans via their GE Capital division)
CitiGroup (only because Rubin is there, since the '80s wherever he goes there have been problems)
Cisco (lots more writeoffs coming, but they are desperate to show that a turnaround has started)

I think the next round will include a few European companies-- witness the first bankers indicted in the Enron scandal (today's FT): three Brits. European companies listed on US exchanges must report IAW GAAP to maintain their US exchange listings. So I'm thinking ADRs or European companies that have merged with large US companies previously listed (think Daimler Chrysler or some of the European banks that acquired US investment banks like UBS-Warburg) Otherwise I would say follow the Andersen audit trail, it seems to be a reliable guide so far.

I'm a goldbug and I've followed GATA for a loooong time. If gold is going to make its move (and it already has been a great blessing for those of us who have been in unhedged junior mining companies for the past 18 months), it needs to do it while there is general upheaval in the US financial markets. Too many vested interests around the globe want to keep the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency (until something better comes along). Hint: it ain't the Euro: Italy cheated and used derivatives to disguise the actual amount of debt on its books to get in, Germany recently blew threw the debt ceiling demanded by the stability pact without any consequences and that would make the French the honest brokers...that's a joke people.

I look at JP Morgan's numbers and I start to twitch. The numbers on their derivitaves exposure look like something out of a grade school argument: "My daddy has eleventy skillion dollars! MY daddy has eleventy skillion ZILLION dollars!"

In all seriousness, could I get a graph or a chart comparing the total amount of derivitaves exposure JP Morgan has as compared to the total amount of all of the money in the world? I'm thinking that would be a very interesting chart indeed.