Why is it -always- Wells Fargo. There are thousands of banks out there, and Wells Fargo is not even close to being the biggest. But why are they in the news every year for some illegal dealings? It feels like they should be broken up or something at this point.
> and Wells Fargo is not even close to being the biggest
Wells Fargo is the 2nd largest mortgage lender in the USA (after Quicken), #4 bank in terms of assets under management, #3 by market cap, #2 in number of branches. It is absolutely massive.
Fair point. I didn't mean to imply they were just some dinky little bank - they are quite large. But they are AFAICT third or fourth largest, and nearly 3x smaller than Chase. But Chase (nor the other top 3) don't have a fraction of the illegal dealings that WF seems to come up with.
The last time they had a big-ticket punishment [0] for their psychotic corporate behavior, it was because they had created millions of fraudulent accounts. There is no way to keep that quiet or "get away with it," they just assumed they would not be meaningfully punished.
What you've posted is completely wrong, but it's the answer to a question I had, which was why the fuck does anyone still bank with Wells Fargo? There must be a lot of people cynical enough to think all banks are that bad.
In the previous case, the company was fined $185Million. The CEO was personally fined $20M in a later lawsuits.
The former CEO's total compensation was > $130M. That sounds much more like a cost of doing business, and a great risk. Heck, fines are classified as an expense for taxes.
I agree that management wasn't taking the punishment seriously, but the CFPB's fine was just part of what the company suffered. I'm pretty sure they've been attacked via pretty much every means of civil or criminal enforcement there is, deservedly so.
Nothing that should keep you from banking with them, mind you... ahem.
On one side of the transaction you see cost of business in these fines, on the other side I see governments deliberately sizing the "fines" so these businesses can keep hurting citizens year after year, and the same governments bailing out the same banks when they compeltely mess up the global economy with their unlimited greed (see the 2008 crisis, and the upcoming debt crise*s*).
At some point these are not fines, they just represent the governments' way of taking their share on the criminal revenues of these banks while they are guiding us straight into the next iceberg. And there is no incentive on either side to make it stop.
When it comes to solutions, I'm reading that the system has to burn to the ground or worse even on HN now... I'm personally of the mind that systems can only change when incentives exist in alternatives. As much as HN dislikes crypto, Bitcoin is one which has taken a principled approach from the start and its community and incentives always presented it as a way to opt-out of the current financial system backed by central-banks/governments (powered by traditional banking). If banks stop being provided with ways to infinitely create debt with politicians behind them promoting it to be able to pretend that everything is fine economically under them, you might see things change... but for this we can't continue playing their game by their rules. We need to opt-out.
If other radical and non-violent ways to solve this exists I am willing to listen and study them... crisis after crisis, I'm becoming more and more cynical about it.
