Wells Fargo CEO Resigns From Fed Advisory Council As Pressure Mounts

• Stumpf was San Francisco Fed appointee to advisory group
• Move comes after senators urge rejection of his reappointment

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf resigned from the Federal Reserve’s Federal Advisory Council as U.S. lawmakers stepped up pressure after revelations that the bank’s employees had opened two million allegedly bogus client accounts.

Stumpf had served as the San Francisco Fed’s appointee to the panel, which is made up of 12 bank representatives and consults with and advises Fed Board of Governors. Its members customarily serve three one-year terms.

“John made a personal decision to resign as the Twelfth District’s representative to the Federal Advisory Council,” Mark Folk, a Wells Fargo spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. “His top priority is leading Wells Fargo.”

Read on.

Senators want Labor Department investigation of Wells Fargo

Sanders, Warren, others question whether bank “aggressively skirted” labor laws

 

Housingwire:

In a letter sent to Tom Perez, the Secretary of Labor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, who made nationwide headlines with her heated questioning of Stumpf, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont; Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey; Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island; Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York; and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, state that they want further investigation into Wells Fargo.

The senators state that the investigation into Wells Fargo conducted by the city of Los Angeles, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau uncovered an environment where employees were subjected to “stringent sales quotas and aggressive incentives, coupled with “staggering neglect by management of the obvious consequences to consumers of those quotas and incentives.”

Senator Warren Calls Out the DOJ – They Ignored 11 Congressional Commission Criminal Referrals!

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Member of the Senate Banking Committee and Ranking Minority Member of the Sub-Committee on Economic Policy, wrote two highly provocative letters this last week requesting a formal investigation into why President Obama’s administration has not brought criminal charges against the individuals and corporations involved in the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

According to Bloomberg, Senator Warren says that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) clearly believed there was enough evidence to prosecute them, and sent many criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, so she wants to open up investigations to better understand why that never happened.

“The Department has failed to hold the individuals and companies accountable,” she wrote. “This failure requires an explanation.” Her letter to FBI Director James Comey asked that he “release records of the FBI investigations into financial misdeeds in the wake of the crisis, to further illuminate why the Obama administration decided not to prosecute firms linked to the financial crisis.”

A three-page letter to FBI Director James Comey, and a twenty page one to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz,  demanded an answer to why the Department of Justice (DOJ) has yet to prosecute any of the major players responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Applauding her demand for an investigation into why the referrals were not followed up, is Phil Angelides who had chaired the FCIC. “This is in the public interest,” he told Avi Asher-Shapiro of International Business Times. “We need to see if there was a fair investigation into what was happening on Wall Street.”

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Regards,

Richard

Richard M. Bowen III
richard@richardmbowen.com
www.richardmbowen.com/
214- 604-5492

Wells Fargo: A basket of deplorable banksters

Rebuild trust??? Stumpf wouldn’t know the word “trust” if it bit him in the butt. Will he give back all of the customers’ monies that they screwed,  will restore all screwed customers’ credit report, will he and all board members give back all of the stock and bonuses that they profitted for 5 years and will Stumpf and the entire board get clawback of their salaries??? Sorry Stumpf, don’t want to hear your sob story. Yer just got caught!

From Wells Fargo press release:

Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO John Stumpf Outlines a Series of New Actions to Strengthen Culture and Rebuild Trust of Customers and Team Members at Senate Banking Committee Hearing

 

Accepts Accountability for Wrongful Sales Practices

Washington, D.C., September 20, 2016

In testimony today before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) Chairman and Chief Executive John Stumpf addressed the wrongful sales practices that have taken place in the company’s retail banking business, outlined the actions to eliminate them, and emphasized the company’s commitment to rebuild trust going forward.

“I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in our retail banking business, and I am fully committed to fixing this issue, strengthening our culture, and taking the necessary actions to restore our customers’ trust,” Stumpf said.

“I want to make it very clear that we never directed nor wanted our team members to provide products and services to customers that they did not need or want. That is not good for our customers, and it is not good for our business. It is against everything we stand for as a company.”

Stumpf said the Wells Fargo Board is actively engaged on this issue. “The Board has the tools to hold senior leadership accountable, including me and Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of our retail banking business.”

He noted that any Board actions taken with named executive officers will be appropriately disclosed. Stumpf added, “I want to be clear on this: I will respect and accept the decision of the Board.”

In his testimony, Stumpf also outlined key actions to ensure its culture is wholly aligned with the interests of its customers, including:

• Ending product sales goals for everyone in the retail banking business to make certain nothing gets in the way of doing what is right for customers;
• Sending customers a confirmation email within one hour of opening any deposit account and an acknowledgement letter after submitting a credit card application;
• Contacting all deposit customers across the country, including those who have already received refunded fees, to invite them to review their accounts with their banker and calling the credit card customers identified in the review to confirm whether they need or want their credit card;
• Expanding the scope of its customer account review and remediation to include 2009 and 2010;
• Conducting an independent, enterprise-wide review of our sales practices.

“I am making a personal commitment to rebuilding our customers’ and investors’ trust, the faith of our team members, and the confidence of the American people,” Stumpf said.

Bernie Sanders working on young adult book, coming out in 2017

Bernie Sanders has been a mayor, a congressman, a senator and an almost-upset presidential nominee. Soon he’ll add “young adult nonfiction author” to that resume.

Sanders’ next book, “Our Revolution,” is being adapted for teenagers and being pitched to booksellers as a high school graduation gift.

The young adult version of the book, which is not yet titled, will come out in April 2017, according to the publisher, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. The publisher shared details about the book project with CNNMoney on Wednesday.

Policy-oriented books are de rigueur for politicians. But they’re usually written for adult readers and read only by devoted supporters and policy wonks.

Sanders is doing something unusual by targeting the teenage market. The book will be written for 12- to 18-year-olds. The list price will be $17, $10 less than the edition for adults.

Read on.

Elizabeth Warren Tells Hillary Clinton Not To Hire Wall Street Donors

And lose the cell numbers of Timmy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a message for Hillary Clinton on Wednesday: Don’t staff your White House with your Wall Street donors.

In a speech to the Center for American Progress — which was set up and is run by former Clinton aides — the Massachusetts Democratic senator said groups backing Clinton’s election campaign should be focused on making sure that a prospective Clinton administration is run by those who intend to enact a progressive agenda.

“I know that personnel is policy,” she told the group. “But let me be clear — when we talk about personnel, we don’t mean advisors who just pay lip service to Hillary’s bold agenda, coupled with a sigh, a knowing glance, and a twiddling of thumbs until it’s time for the next swing through the revolving door, serving government then going back to the very same industries they regulate.  We don’t mean Citigroup or Morgan Stanley or BlackRock getting to choose who runs the economy in this country so they can capture our government.”

Read on.

Wells Fargo board member and ex-Denver Mayor Peña faces heat in Wells Fargo scandal

DENVER BUSINESS JOURNAL – Former Denver Mayor Federico Peña’s oversight role on the board at Wells Fargo & Co. has come up in the controversy enveloping Colorado’s biggest bank over the creation of millions of phony customer accounts by employees faced with meeting sales goals.

Peña — also a two-time Cabinet secretary in the administration of former President Bill Clinton and today a senior advisor at New York-based Vestar Capital Partners — is a board member at San Francisco-based Wells (NYSE: WFC), and has served for the last few months as head of the board’s Corporate Responsibility Committee.

Mike Mayo, an analyst at brokerage and investment group CLSA who follows Wells Fargo, says the bank “should institute … changes to its board for the head of the Corporate Responsibility Committee (Federico Peña),” among other reforms.

Read on.

I called the Wells Fargo ethics line and was fired

CNN Money:

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.

“They ruined my life,” Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

 

Does a Golden Parachute Await Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf?

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and explains why criminal prosecutions of executives time after time are not happening. The video is below and if you would like to view with a transcript, click here.

Breaking: ICIJ and media partners reveal details of latest offshore leak

New revelations published today by theInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the German newspaperSüddeutsche Zeitung and news organizations from Europe, South America, Asia and Africa reveal fresh information about offshore companies in the Bahamas.

Alongside detailed reporting, ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung and other media partners are making details from the Bahamas corporate registry available to the public. This creates, for the first time, a free, online and publicly-searchable registry of offshore companies set up in the island nation that has sometimes been called “The Switzerland of the West.”

“We see it as a service to the public to make this basic kind of information openly available,” said Gerard Ryle, the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

“There is much evidence to suggest that where you have secrecy in the offshore world you have the potential for wrong doing. So let’s eliminate the secrecy.”

The cache of documents from the island nation’s corporate registry provides names of directors and some owners of more than 175,000 Bahamian companies, trusts and foundations registered between 1990 and early 2016.

The leaked Bahamian files reveal details of the offshore activities of prime ministers, ministers, princes and convicted felons.

Read on.