NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's gotten to the point where it seems easier to name the firms that haven't (so far) gotten mixed up in the mutual fund scandal than those that have.

Monday's news was that Morgan Stanley will, according to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, enter into a $50 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the way it sold mutual funds to individual investors.

Last week FleetBoston, Wachovia, Pilgrim Baxter, Schwab, Legg Mason, Bank of New York, American Express and Raymond James either fessed up to wrong doing or said they were being probed.

And then there's Bear Stearns, Fred Alger Management, Federated -- (take a breath) -- Putnam, Alliance, Bank One, Janus, Strong, Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney.

We're probably missing some here; it's hard to keep up.

The point is that the funds trading scandal is big -- so big, in fact, that it almost doesn't seem like it matters. It begins to seem a bit like jaywalking in New York City: Even though it's against the law, so many people do it that the ones who don't seem a little funny. When former Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to enforce the jaywalking laws, people kept on doing it, right in front of traffic cops.

But the analogy doesn't hold up very well, once you start looking at it. If anything, the fund trading scandal is reminiscent of what happens when the feds crack down on mob-run businesses. You start to realize that innocuous as everything might have seemed, everyday people incur costs when somebody's getting an undeserved cut out of every public construction project in the fair city of New York.

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And just as there came a time when the rigging of construction projects in New York was no longer given the wink, it doesn't look like firms involved in the trading scandals are going to be given the wink, either. There will be SEC fines, like the $50 million that Morgan reportedly will pay and the as-yet-undetermined fine Putnam will pay. And there will be shareholder lawsuits.

The firms involved could end up seeing hefty hits to their bottom lines. Recently, Alliance Capital has ventured to put a cost on it's involvement in the scandal; it's set aside $190 million against its exposure. That's just one of over twenty firms.

Until they can better assess exactly what the scandal's impact will be, these are going to be nervous times for investors in financial services companies.