Wells Fargo is a hotbed of crime

That’s not laughter and sadness! That’s begrudging admiration followed by intense thirst for revenge.

Awesome gif though.

Yeah. it is definitely a unique expression going on there.

As an anecdote, the WF offices here in Santa Monica have stopped paying for parking for their employees. So that’s an additional $200+ fee that anyone driving to work is going to have to shoulder going forward. Not a big deal for many but for the lower end folks that’s quite a hit.

$200 per month? Year?

Oops, sorry, meant to list that as 200+ per month.

They need to send a few people to jail is what they need to do. Make management criminally responsible for their actions. Make other executives at other companies think twice about their actions.

As for the shareholders, I am not sure why they are brought up. The stock has dropped, I imagine. Let them replace the guilty and gain the public’s confidence and the stock will go up.

Based on what many of them are paid that is quite a hit. My sister worked in downtown SF at one time, for the state. The state eventually took away parking, new parking cost up to $15 a day, so she rarely drove into the city anymore, taking BART. She had that option. Not sure someone in Santa Monica would.

Some people are able to take the Metro in but most people drive from what I understand. Their offices are across the street from where I’m currently working. I was just surprised when they took that away from them - seems awfully petty, given the huge bonuses, salaries, etc that the top brass likely make.

That seems to be becoming more common. My company justified it by saying, “We have determined that our parking policy was too generous when compared to industry norms.” Then trying to make it seem like the stupid pre-tax saving account to pay for parking was some kind of benefit they were providing.

Good to see all these companies making good use of their tax savings - trickling it down!

My thought exactly. The outstanding cares about their employees so much that they will literally commit identify theft under the guise of “fake accounts” to make unobtainable employment goals is not taking all that money they saved in taxes and screwing their employees by decreasing their wages by around 2400 dollars. Nice. This must be “winning.”

Well they gotta pay that $1 billion somehow. They’re not gonna take it out of executive bonuses!

Your assumption made me curious, so I looked.

Nope, stock is around 5-6% higher than it was the day before the news initially broke about the fraud. But looking at all the pages of entries “controversies” section of the Wikipedia entry for Wells Fargo, perhaps their shareholders are simply used to this sort of shit.

And it keeps getting better for Wells Fargo:

(Reuters) - The Labor Department is examining whether Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) pushed participants in low-cost corporate 401(k) plans to roll their holdings into more expensive individual retirement accounts at the bank, according to a person familiar with the inquiry the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wells-fargo-accounts/wells-fargos-401-practices-being-examined-by-labor-dept-wsj-idUSKBN1HX2SN

Sadly, this is probably not unique to Wells Fargo unless they did it in some sort of illegal way.

They were trying to push a law that forced financial advisers to basically do what’s best for their client and not the company or the employee, but I think that died with the GOP.

I wouldn’t doubt at all that you are correct. Depending on how much money they were making on employees though, this could add to the other items they are already in trouble for.

No doubt they are getting more scrutiny due to their other problems. I am just not convinced it’s enough to actually change behavior. What they really need is to just rip the crop out, let the field fallow and put an end to Wells entirely, no golden parachutes either, assuming the end goal is so stop and discourage the kind of behavior Wells practiced.

Sort of. The Obama Labour Department introduced a fiduciary rule for financial advisors and (crucially) brokers in relation to retirement accounts. When Trump came in, he ordered a review and the department ultimately delayed the key bits for 18 months, so while they were technically law, they never took effect. Then a panel of a federal appeals court said the original rulemaking was improper, so it’s all off the table now unless appealed, which seems unlikely, though various states are pushing for it.

Right…

I guess what I was getting at is I don’t inspect any improvement in this area at a Federal level with this president and a GOP controlled federal government. What I consider unethical they consider well I guess just business.

Deja Vu, all over again, but the important customers this time:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wells-fargo-employees-altered-information-on-business-customers-documents-1526564170