This is incredibly good advice!
No, you can deal with the fact he will retire to a life of fabulous wealth and luxury.
If you don’t want him to you’ll have to vote for a congress, senate and white house full of Sanders/Stein hybrids, or put your executive class up against the wall because there is no reformation movement with any real power.
Man, I hate to say it but personal experience has borne this out for me: do not trust HR. Especially in large corporations.
When I worked at WalMart as a teenager, they touted their “open door policy” with management to all the staff. A girl there went to management to report a CSM who was sexually harassing her. She got fired the following week because they said she took too long a break. Time theft or some shit.
It’s fucking WalMart so they did her a favor, but still, lesson learned.
Agreed. I’ve seen too much in my years to think any differently.
I agree with you, except that I find it disturbing to see Sanders, a serious and sober public servant, lumped in with a useless whackjob.
I agree.
As the WSJ reports employees not the bank benefited from opening the fake accounts.
The data seems to support it. On Mad Money, John Stumpf said that of the 2+ million potentially fraudulent 110,000 had charges or fees which added up to $2.6 million. 110,00 out of 93 million accounts is a small number .Now on a company who’s revenue is the roughly $40 billion that is a trivial amount of money. Individual employees got $25 bonus per new account. He also said that have about 100,000 front line employees and they fired ~1,000 per year or about 1%.
The reason amount of fees was so small is almost all cases the accounts were closed within 30 days. The employee got his $25 and then closed the fake account. I have a Wells Fargo checking account, which I use infrequently. If somebody opened a credit card, or a saving account in my name and they closed the account 30 days later I’m not really harmed.
Now the individual opening the fake account committed a crime of some type, identify theft plus violating a lot of banking regulations. Do we really want to jail these people? I’m sure some of them were told how by their supervisor, who may some incentive for his employees to hit their new account targets. Possibly, the second level manager had knowledge. However, by the time you get to branch manager, their incentives are based on profits or revenue. So I doubt more than a handful were involved. It sounds like people want to jail the executives cause they knew their employees were doing illegal activities. Management fired 5,000 of these employees and I’d like to know what crime you’d charge them with.?
Anybody who fired a whistleblower should go to jail, and of course, a fired whistleblower has a lucrative lawsuit in front of them.
The real crime was that of bad management, giving people $25 for opening a new account, but having no system to spot obvious frauds like wellsfargo.com email address is just stupid management, especially for a bank. Ms Tolstedt was planning on retiring at the end of the year, so denying her 2016, bonus and clawing back years worth of previous pay is probably the right penalty.
The real victims are the shareholders. The stock is down 10% so I’ve lost $2,500 on paper and Warren Buffett lost $2 billion. By all accounts, John Stumpf is very good CEO, if the board wants to fire him that’s fine, or if Warren Buffett weighs in he should go. But I actually trust the guy to put Wells Fargo back on track.
If it’s not been posted, Elizabeth Warren’s take down of Stumpf.
Elizabeth sure likes to hear herself talk. I miss the Elizabeth Warren when she was the professor.
According to Warren, they used the number of accounts per customer as a means to boost stock prices and sell their success to stockholders. That would be a huge benefit to the bank, especially the higher ups.
“Eight is great.”
Seriously, that’s some topline corporate thinking right there.
But let’s blame the $12/hr employees.
Not to mention the fact that Stumpf had compensation tied to performance on new accounts.
Exactly. You can’t just look at how much money each account made or each employee made from an open account. If they used the existence of these accounts to prop reports and sell stocks, whatever… that’s a clear benefit.
I keep thinking Stumpf is a name filter replacement for He Who Shall Not Be Named.
She’s not the only one - would love to hear her disassemble Trump on any of his numerous scams.
Well, it’s true, having multiple accounts is good for the bank and also the customer.
I think consolidating your financial affairs at a single institution is smart. You get better treatment, the more accounts/money you have, it is easier to move money around, and it is much easier to have a handle on how much money you have, cash flow etc. The first thing I did when I took over my Mom’s finances is consolidated from 12 different financial institutions down to 3. 95+% of my money is at Schwab, I often get asked for financial advice and the first thing I tell people is move to all your money to Vanguard, Fidelity, or Schwab, or Wells Fargo if you have to have a traditional bank.
Part of the reason I bought the Wells stock is because they did a great job of getting multiple products per customer. Let’s be clear the reason the stock price went up is because Wells Fargo earnings went up. The fact that had 93 million vs 91 million accounts (as many as 2 million fraudulent accounts) is pretty insignificant. Stumpf compensation was tied to the performance of the new accounts, how much additional revenue and profit they generated not how many there were. So when a low-level employee created a fake credit card account, and the bank spent the money to send a new card, and then the employee canceled after a few weeks. It cost Wells Fargo, money and lowered the profitable of new accounts, that hurt John Stumpf financially not helped him.
At $25 buck per account, that means as much as $50 million was fraudulently paid as a bonus to employees. Although presumably, the number was smaller than that cause the probably canceled the $25/account bonus to the 5,000 folks they fired.
So when Elizabeth talks about a teller who was stealing $20 from the bin, that is exactly what the the “poor” $12/hour employees were doing. So why would we jail or fire a CEO or top executive cause tellers were stealing?
Selling stuff is hard. I hate selling stuff, most people I know also hate it. It is hard to figure out how to incentive your sales employees. If they aren’t on a commission when the customers walk into your business. best case they get decent service, but without pressure to buy, you lose sales, worse case they ignore the customer. But if you put people on commission, best case your sales increase, and you piss some customers off with your pushy sales people, worse case the sales staff learns how to game the system… It looks Wells had both the best and the worse case.
Finding the balance and preventing the worse case is the job of management and Ms. Toldstedt failed and so she was fined and basically fired. The board of directors actually did its job.
But when I hear the former low-level levels complain, “Nobody told me to fake account, but I knew they knew”, or the quotas were ridiculous. I saw this is a bull shit rational for breaking the law. I’d expect the salesforce to figure out the game the system, but I wouldn’t expect them to break the law to beat the system. AFAIK, the incentive had a quota say 100 new accounts a month (made up number) and the employees get $25/account above the target. So yes only the best employees made the bonus. But about 99% of the Wells Fargo worker didn’t find it necessary to cheat, or worth breaking the law for $25. So hell ya I’m going to blame 1% of the $12/hour employees who behaved like criminals. In hindsight, maybe Wells should have referred them to police for prosecution, but the PR would have been awful.
Banks and bankers are to the left, the equivalents of black, and immigrants to Trump supports, the folks responsible for all of the problems of the country. So I’m not surprised on the witch hunt.
Except, you know, banks actually did tank the world’s economy. And then we gave them money and didn’t change anything.
Absolutely, but the Greens are anti-corporatist faction so it’s more about them than her
No the world economy tanked because of banks, bankers, hedge fund managers, government, government regulators, folks who lied on mortgage applications, mortgage brokers, realtors, greedy home owners, greedy investors, people who were too lazy to read what they were investing in, and general lack of imagination.
Except all those things tie back to banks really. Except maybe realtors. The banks lobbied to get deregulated and within a decade of that happening they’d tanked the planet. Then we gave them money to pay for their mistake with no strings attached so they can just to all over again.
There is a reason historically you didn’t loan money to people who can’t pay you back: you’d lose money. If I give $1000 to a homeless crackhead and expect him to pay me back with interest… well most people aren’t going to blame the crackhead when I’m suddenly out a grand.