What's keeping megabank execs out of jail? Fear.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 10:22 am

It sucks the Conyers is my rep. He's a snake. I simply can't vote republican and support their insanity no matter who runs and there is literally no information I can find on either of the two non bipartisan candidates. It's feeling more and more like I need to sit at home in November and the feels like the most wrongest of all possible answers. I really hate DC.

I was watching a show on PBS last night about McGovern vs Chisholm, something I would have been one year old for, and it wow that should be a major movie shown before every election. Just <blech> to our whole process.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:57 pm

http://fortune.com/2016/09/12/wells-far ... -tolstedt/

Zarathud · Post by **Zarathud** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 7:34 pm

Someone is getting paid to leave Wells Fargo quietly and with her mouth shut.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Tue Sep 20, 2016 2:20 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8HfGAx8coE

<3

Kraken · Post by **Kraken** » Tue Sep 20, 2016 4:26 pm

LordMortis wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8HfGAx8coE

<3

So glad she stayed out of the presidential circus. Love how she pwns that SOB.

tjg_marantz · Post by **tjg_marantz** » Tue Sep 20, 2016 4:34 pm

That was fun

GreenGoo · Post by **GreenGoo** » Tue Sep 20, 2016 4:48 pm

If only it mattered.

Luckily the Reps (mostly) are pulling regulation laws off the books to free up the market from government interference.

Geezus.

Rip · Post by **Rip** » Wed Sep 21, 2016 7:49 pm

Those giving between $100,000 and $250,000, according to the Clinton Foundation list, included Washington University, the Wells Fargo Foundation (Wells Fargo Advisers is headquartered in St. Louis); and Joyce A. Aboussie, a longtime Democratic operative and adviser to former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-St. Louis.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt ... 3832f.html

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed Sep 21, 2016 9:16 pm

Hillary Goddamn Clinton

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Wed Sep 21, 2016 9:40 pm

A) It's Advisors, not Advisers.
B) Wells Fargo Advisors is the brokerage firm.
C) Wells Fargo & Company is headquartered out of San Francisco.
D) The Wells Fargo Foundation is headquartered out of Minneapolis.
E) The foundation's Activities are listed as "(602) Gifts, grants, or loans to other organizations"
F) Why aren't you calling out Boeing or InBev?

Anheuser-Busch's charitable foundation and the Boeing Company, which is not headquartered in the region but has a large presence, both are listed as having given between $1 million and $5 million.

I'm sure InBev would have benefited from lax regulatory powers over the SABMiller acquisition, but then, the same can be said for their 2008 acquisition of Anheuser Busch

And then there's that whole new USAF tanker contract debacle.

tjg_marantz · Post by **tjg_marantz** » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:47 am

Benghazi?

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Wed Sep 28, 2016 5:03 pm

Bloomberg

California, the nation’s largest issuer of municipal bonds, is barring Wells Fargo & Co. from underwriting state debt and handling its banking transactions after the company admitted to opening potentially millions of bogus customer accounts.

The suspension, in effect immediately, will remain in place for 12 months. A "permanent severance" will occur if the bank doesn’t change its practices, State Treasurer John Chiang said Wednesday. The state also won’t add to its investments in Wells Fargo securities. Chiang already replaced Wells Fargo with Loop Capital for two muni deals totaling about $527 million that will be sold next week.
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The move by California is the latest to punish the bank, which is facing a national furor over the fraudulent accounts. San Francisco, the home of Wells Fargo, last week removed it from a banking program for low-income residents. Authorities including the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $185 million on Sept. 8 for potentially opening about 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts without authorization. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf has forfeited $41 million in pay.
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Chiang, a Democrat who’s running for governor in 2018, oversees about $2 trillion in banking transactions a year and manages a $75 billion investment pool. The bank served as the lead underwriter of five of the past 13 bond offerings from the state this year. Chiang said the effect on the bank is "significant" since he targeted the most profitable lines of business.
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Chiang, who called for the resignation of Stumpf, said other state treasurers should also withhold business from the company. "Those that have the financial wherewithal, those who have the courage, I think they ought to follow suit," he said.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Sep 29, 2016 2:02 pm

Military repossessions

Wells Fargo & Co., reeling from weeks of pummeling over fraudulent customer accounts, is now facing a Justice Department sanction over improperly repossessing cars owned by members of the military, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Federal prosecutors and the bank’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are planning to punish the San Francisco-based lender for alleged violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, said the people, who asked not to be named because the investigation isn’t public. A penalty of as much as $20 million is expected from the OCC, one of the people said. That’s an unusually large fine for abuse of this law, which in most cases requires that firms obtain court orders before seizing vehicles from soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who are delinquent on their loans.
...
Shielding soldiers from financial stress has been a priority for lawmakers, and the Justice Department has recently stepped up enforcement actions against banks for taking assets illegally. Banco Santander SA’s U.S. unit agreed to pay $9 million last year over allegations that it improperly confiscated more than 1,000 vehicles from military members, the largest settlement ever obtained in a case involving repossessions of automobiles with delinquent loans.

Wells Fargo -- which was the world’s most valuable bank before the account scandal hurt its stock price -- has branches on eight U.S. military bases, include Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort Benning in Georgia, Fort Dix in New Jersey and Hill Air Force Base in Utah.
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The bank has previously been accused of not adhering to the military lending law, which Congress approved decades ago to protect soldiers from legal hassles while they’re on active duty. Wells Fargo agreed to compensate borrowers as one of five mortgage servicers sanctioned for improper home foreclosures, paying $28 million for so-called non-judicial foreclosures that didn’t pass through courts and $59 million for those handled in the judicial system, according to statements issued by the Justice Department last year. The bank didn’t admit or deny the allegations.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Sep 29, 2016 4:45 pm

Stumpf

But the company’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf — whom the members of the House Financial Services Committee personally blamed for the persistent and widespread misdeeds — stuck to the same script he has used throughout the crisis. The problem, he explained, was an ethical lapse limited to the 5,300 employees, most of them low-level bankers and tellers, who had been fired for their actions since 2011.

At the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Stumpf apologized repeatedly for his bank’s failings and repeated his earlier pledge — given last week to the disgruntled Senate Finance Committee — to accept “full responsibility” for them. But he again rejected lawmakers’ attempts to cast the scandal as a consequence of broader failings in Wells Fargo’s leadership and corporate culture.
...
Confronted by the lawmakers with evidence that the practice of setting up phony accounts to meet sales goals might have gone back much further than the bank has admitted, perhaps to 2007. Mr. Stumpf said that Wells Fargo was continuing to investigate the extent of the problem, how far back it stretched and who knew.

But those steps did not appease the lawmakers. Several called for Mr. Stumpf’s resignation, and others asked why he shouldn’t be jailed, like a bank robber.
...
As Mr. Stumpf testified, a video screen on the hearing room’s wall displayed a scroll of more than a dozen fines Wells Fargo has paid in recent years, totaling more than $10 billion. The list included penalties for subprime loan abuses, discriminating against African-American and Hispanic mortgage borrowers, and foreclosure violations, among others.

Mr. Hensarling asked whether such fines are simply the “cost of doing business.”

Mr. Stumpf answered no, adding, “I don’t want our culture to be defined by these mistakes.”
...
Wells Fargo has said it is contacting all of the customers who may have been affected. So far, the bank has contacted 20,000 customers with questionable credit cards. About a quarter of them have said that they did not apply for the card or could not remember if they had, Mr. Stumpf said at the hearing.
...
The plight of Wells Fargo workers who lost their jobs for not meeting sales goals came up several times during the hearing, with lawmakers citing personal experiences from their constituents. Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Democrat of New York, asked how many workers Wells Fargo had fired for falling short.

“My understanding is that people should not be fired, terminated for missing sales goals,” Mr. Stumpf answered. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen. We’re doing a review of whatever, whoever might have been terminated for that.”

As for those who did take the fall for the illegal account openings, Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat of California, was particularly acerbic. “You fired 5,300 people,” he said at the hearing. “You took 5,300 good Americans and turned them into felons.” It is time, he concluded, to break up the big banks.
...
“I am really amazed, and I’ve heard more ‘I don’t knows’ from a C.E.O. than I think I ever heard in my life,” said Representative Roger Williams, a Republican of Texas and a Wells Fargo customer. “I came to Congress to deregulate, and because of your actions, it’s really making it extremely difficult for me.”

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 5:26 pm

Stumpfset

Embattled Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John Stumpf is stepping down from the bank he has led for nearly a decade, following intense scrutiny over a fake accounts scandal that erupted last month.

The San Francisco-based bank said Wednesday that Stumpf informed the company’s board of directors that he is retiring from the bank and its board immediately. The bank’s board elected President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Sloan to replace him and named him to the board.

GreenGoo · Post by **GreenGoo** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 5:28 pm

Someone buy Warren a drink.

Someone run Stumpf over with a truck.

malchior · Post by **malchior** » Wed Oct 12, 2016 5:33 pm

I am guessing his demise was engineered by Sloan. Still how is the COO not also implicated in this scheme?

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Mon Apr 10, 2017 11:21 am

Bloomberg

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. took that idea a step further. On Friday, it recommended that at the annual meeting on April 25, investors should vote for only three of the company's 15 directors: Two who joined in February and the new CEO, Tim Sloan.

That recommendation took on added urgency on Monday after the bank released the results of a six-month investigation by a panel of independent directors, who deflected blame, saying that top executives including former CEO John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of community banking, misled them about the extent of the issues with the bank's sales practices. On Monday, Wells Fargo's directors said that they were clawing back an additional $75 million in compensation from Stumpf and Tolstedt.

As expected, Wells Fargo & Co. has defended its board, describing ISS's recommendation as "extreme and unprecedented." It added that the firm isn't giving the bank credit for enhanced accountability, including forgone executive compensation and an improved corporate governance structure. One highlight of the latter was the bank's decision to split the CEO and chairman roles, which to be fair is something that investors in other major U.S. banks like Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are still confronting.
...
Apart from instances of shareholder activism, it's rare for the majority of a board to exit. But it's happened on occasion, including once in 2008. ISS recommended that shareholders withhold votes for all nine Cooper Cos. directors because the company amended its poison pill provisions without giving shareholders a say. In the end, five didn't receive enough shareholder support.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Fri Jun 16, 2017 5:28 pm

Wells Fargo not alone in fake accounts/charges?

A former CenturyLink Inc. employee claims she was fired for blowing the whistle on the telecommunications company's high-pressure sales culture that left customers paying millions of dollars for accounts they didn't request, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Arizona state superior court...

...The complaint alleges CenturyLink "allowed persons who had a personal incentive to add services or lines to customer accounts to falsely indicate on the CenturyLink system the approval by a customer of new lines or services." This would sometimes result in charges that hadn't been authorized by customers, according to the complaint.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:06 pm

It appears to be happening again. Looks like the new buzzword will be CLO's:

In recent years, moreover, a greater part of corporate borrowing has come in the form of bank loans that are quickly packaged into securities known as CLOs, or collateralized loan obligations, which are sliced and diced and sold off to sophisticated investors just as home loans were during the mortgage bubble. Bloomberg News recently reported that pension funds and insurance companies, particularly those in Japan, can’t get enough of the CLOs because of the higher yields that they offer. Wells Fargo estimates that a record $150 billion will be issued this year, roughly double last year’s issuance. And as happened with the late-cycle home mortgages in 2007 and 2008, analysts are noticing a marked decline in the quality of loans in the CLO packages, with three-quarters of them now without the standard covenants designed to reduce the chance of default.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:51 pm

This look suspiciously like an article I posted in the turmoil thread. But I got no response. Perhaps your luck will be better.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 8:53 am

Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S. 2155) aka Bank Lobbyist Act. Banks are back in control.

Also worth a read: Chain of Title.

GreenGoo · Post by **GreenGoo** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 10:16 am

Phew. It's been almost a decade since they tried to burn it all down. That's plenty of time without a financial crisis, don't you think?

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 11:13 am

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 10:16 am Phew. It's been almost a decade since they tried to burn it all down. That's plenty of time without a financial crisis, don't you think?

Well's Fargo is on the radio publicly apologizing and promising it'll never happen again.

GreenGoo · Post by **GreenGoo** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 11:25 am

That must make you feel good? You were one of the ones directly affected, and have been trying to get your head and house above water since 2008. All is forgiven, then?

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 11:47 am

I don't actually blame the banks for the bad debt but neither would I have let them survive their collapse. I blame the voters and our elected officials and debt accumulators more than anything. I'm still not a fan of all of the forgiveness and QE crap. And everything becoming "affordable" by tax funded bailouts. I don't blame people for walking away from their mortgages. That was their collatoral. I don't blame banks for making shitty loans. Their level of toxicity was backed and promoted by our government. I blame our government and I blame us for giving us this government. I am both conservative and liberal in my views. When the shit hit the fan and everyone simply said "fuck this shit I'm out." We should have begun nationalizing those institutions taking advantage of toxic situations.

We remain fucked up. And it'll take people with better foresight who are smarter than I will ever be to unfuckify us. I'm hopeful that I'll recognize the right people. I like to think I'm both a pretty good judge of smarts and of character. All I can really do is hope I can accumulate enough wealth, legally protect it, and die quick enough to not see it raided by expenses to help keep my nieces and nephews and their children barely on the left side of needle of the wealth gap. Well that, and hope I am afforded the opportunity to cheer on the right unfuckifiers so I can alter my hopes.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:36 pm

It wasn't just the bad debt. Even if you put that all on the debtors, the banks are still deep in this shit. It was the reselling of known bad debt as good debt. It was the constant obfuscation of known bad debt. It was title forgery and executing illegal foreclosures. All that and more was common practice in all kinds of banks. Much of it still is.

Banks own banking regulators. It's as simple as that. And you can't buy them back with votes.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:43 pm

BTW, the only thing that logically keeps us chattel compliant is the stock market. Boomers and Xers have their futures tied up in it. But even that is not ours, really. 86% of it is owned by the richest 10% of the population. We're allowed the scraps to keep us from the table.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:47 pm

LordMortis wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 11:47 am I don't actually blame the banks for the bad debt but neither would I have let them survive their collapse.

We tried this, and it was what led to the bailout as it was on the precipice of completely freezing the credit markets and destroying the world economy. It's where the damn term Too Big to Fail came from.

It still isn't fixed, so this still won't work, so yes, we do need to blame the banks and their lobbyists per the above links.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:50 pm

In other news, one possible safe haven also appears (well, is) rife with fraud:

A concentrated campaign of price manipulation may have accounted for at least half of the increase in the price of Bitcoin and other big cryptocurrencies last year, according to a paper released on Wednesday by an academic with a history of spotting fraud in financial markets.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:51 pm

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:36 pm It was title forgery and executing illegal foreclosures. All that and more was common practice in all kinds of banks. Much of it still is.

BTW, the only thing that logically keeps us chattel compliant is the stock market. Boomers and Xers have their futures tied up in it. But even that is not ours, really. 86% of it is owned by the richest 10% of the population. We're allowed the scraps to keep us from the table.

Trudat and they among the top of them they have the power to manipulate no matter what the SEC seems to say or do

https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answer ... ulhtm.html

sound like anyone we know?

GreenGoo · Post by **GreenGoo** » Thu Jun 14, 2018 1:42 am

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:36 pm It wasn't just the bad debt. Even if you put that all on the debtors, the banks are still deep in this shit. It was the reselling of known bad debt as good debt. It was the constant obfuscation of known bad debt. It was title forgery and executing illegal foreclosures. All that and more was common practice in all kinds of banks. Much of it still is.

Banks own banking regulators. It's as simple as that. And you can't buy them back with votes.

Thanks Lawbeef. While there is a factor re: government forcing bad loans through regulation, Banks sure didn't seem to be unhappy about it, otherwise they'd have put a stop to it via lobbyists.

The banks were fraudulent when they repackaged the bad debt (forced on them by the government, sorta) into magically good investment vehicles so complex that even they had no idea what was backing the products they were selling.

Putting 2008 on the American public is exactly what I would expect a partisan hack to do, because while there is an element of truth to it, it's not all the truth, or even the most important truth.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 9:56 am

Fortune

In its continuing string of settlements and scandals, Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $2.09 billion for actions that allegedly contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Department of Justice said Wednesday.

That new penalty comes on top of a $1.2 billion fine Wells Fargo agreed to pay in April 2016 in relation to the Financial Crisis. The Department of Justice alleged at the time that Wells had deceived the Federal Housing Administration into insuring risky mortgages that were ineligible for federal support between the years of 2001 and 2008.
...
On Wednesday, the DoJ alleged that Wells Fargo had issued residential mortgages to creditors they knew to have overstated their income, or failed to meet the bank’s internal risk threshold.
...
Still, Wells Fargo made no admission of liability as part of the settlement, with CEO Tim Sloan saying in a statement: “We are pleased to put behind us these legacy issues regarding claims related to residential mortgage-backed securities activities that occurred more than a decade ago.”

Shares of the company also remained relatively unmoved, with investors having anticipated the Department of Justice settlement. On Wednesday, Wells Fargo also revealed that it had already set aside the amount needed to make the payment.

In line with what came to light in 2016 about the company’s history of aggressive sales tactics, the Justice Department’s investigation alleged that Wells Fargo sought to double its production of subprime and Alt-A loans (which typically fall on borrowers with lower credit scores) between 2005 and 2006, even creating a campaign dubbed “Courageous Underwriting” that pushed employees to approve potentially riskier loans.

Specifically, the bank sought to bolster a risky mortgage known as the so-called stated income loans. Rather than depending of credit scores, the stated income loan depends on the borrower to report their own wages, and did not require documented proof of said income, the department said.

But in subsequent investigations between 2005 to 2007, the bank discovered that about 70% of borrowers were overstating their income by at least 20% in that time frame, after acquiring tax transcripts from the Internal Revenue Services, Justice Department said. And those investigations, which were spread monthly among Wells Fargo employees, revealed that borrowers who over-reported their earnings on average said they were pulling in 65% more than their actual wages, the DoJ alleged.

Despite the report’s wide monthly dissemination however, the company continued to expand those businesses, the DoJ alleged.

The bank also “took steps” to protect itself, government investigators said, alleging that Wells Fargo moved many of the income mortgages outside of its own loan portfolio which it held for investment.

As a result, Wells Fargo sold at least 73,539 stated income loans between 2005 and 2007. Half of those have since defaulted.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 11:00 am

I live how they say it was borrowers overstating their income. Loan agents were caught numerous times forging income statements. And those that didn't forget them encouraged clients to inflate incomes. It was a harmless, everyone-is-doing it, white lie. Stated income loans were created so bowerers could borrow more than they should.

Moliere · Post by **Moliere** » Sun Sep 02, 2018 2:19 pm

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:35 pm

CBS News

Federal regulators are fining former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf $17.5 million and banning him from the banking industry for life for his role in a scandal in which company employees opened millions of fake accounts without customers' consent.

Along with the penalty for Stumpf, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said Thursday it was suing five other former Wells Fargo executives for a combined $37.5 million in connection with the scandal. Two other executives also settled with regulators, paying million-dollar fines.
...
As part of their settlements and lawsuits against these Wells' executives, regulators seek to ban all of them from ever working in the banking industry.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:40 am

Imagine this. A Wells Fargo bank clerk steals $250K in cash. He is caught. His penalty is to pay $50K and never work as a bank clerk ever again.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:47 pm

A retirement-age bank clerk . Stumpf is 66.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:34 pm

And yet, still no jail.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Thu Jun 25, 2020 7:23 pm

Oh, and besides the Fed snapping up billions (trillions?) in corporate debt, now we get this:

U.S. banking regulators are about to ease restrictions created in the aftermath of the Great Recessions, a development that sent bank stocks surging Thursday.

Federal Deposit Insurance Commission officials said on a call that they are loosening the restrictions from the Volcker Rule, allowing banks to more easily make large investments into venture capital and similar funds.

The banks will also be able avoid setting aside cash for derivatives trades between different units of the same firm, potentially freeing up billions of dollars in capital for the industry.

What is already a massive bailout of bad corporate debt and debt packages by the US Taxpayer, has now gotten worse.

Now the US Taxpayer is going to have to bailout banks again. Fcuk.