donald drumpf and the republicans hate the CFPB / Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by +Senator Elizabeth Warren D MA to protect American consumers from the greed of the bank-financial wall street cabal, the people who created the 2008 recession. The CFPB brought the wells fargo fraud story to light, fined wells fargo $185 million for their criminal activity and Sen Warren has been at the forefront of the US Senate Banking Committee's investigation on wells fraudgo. If donald drumpf is elected president and the republicans retain control of the Senate they will destroy the CFPB, leaving wells fraudgo and the rest of the bank-financial wall street cabal to pillage the American people and economy. Check out this video of Sen Warren during the Senate Banking Committee's hearings on wells fargo's criminal activities followed by her questioning at the Senate Banking Committee's hearings on Consumer Finance Regulations by the CFPB. Videos from Sen Warren's YouTube site and the articles from +Mother Jones and +BoldProgressives .....
Elizabeth Warren Just Eviscerated the Wells Fargo CEO
"You should resign…You should be criminally investigated."
SEP. 20, 2016 1:19 PM
Published on Sep 20, 2016
Senator Elizabeth Warren's two round of questions for Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf at the September 20, 2016 Senate Banking Committee hearing entitled: "An Examination of Wells Fargo’s Unauthorized Accounts and the Regulatory Response." For more information on the hearing, click here:http://www.banking.senate.gov/public/...
Senator Elizabeth Warren questions Leonard Chanin at Banking Hearing on Consumer Finance Regulations
Published on Apr 5, 2016
Senator Elizabeth Warren's Q&A of Leonard Chanin at an April 5, 2016 Senate Banking Committee hearing titled, "Assessing the Effects of Consumer Finance Regulations."
More information about the hearing is available at http://1.usa.gov/1S2V1sQ.
More information about the hearing is available at http://1.usa.gov/1S2V1sQ.
The Senate Banking Committee conducted a hearing Tuesday about the massive scandal currently engulfing Wells Fargo. The word "fraud" was used repeatedly by senators on both sides of the aisle when describing the bank's creation of millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts for existing customers.
Fallout from the account scandal continues to pile up. The bank is also facing an investigation by the House Financial Services Committee, subpoenas from the Department of Justice, and at least one potential class-action lawsuit.
First up at Tuesday's Senate hearing was Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who was grilled by the committee for almost three hours.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a longtime advocate for more stringent regulation of Wall Street—tore into Stumpf, describing the unauthorized accounts as a "massive, yearslong scam." She asked Stumpf what he has done to take responsibility for his bank's actions. "You have said repeatedly, 'I am accountable,'" she said. "But what have you done to actually hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned?"
Stumpf avoided answering the question directly, prompting Warren to repeat her question, her voice rising, at least three times.
Warren proceeded to pummel Stumpf with more questions. "Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam was going on?" she asked. Stumpf evaded the question several times. (Stumpf said earlier in the hearing that he earned $19.3 million last year.) Finally, an exasperated Warren said, "I'll take that as a 'no.'"
She then asked if he'd fired any members of his senior management. Stumpf initially began by describing the firing of regional branch managers, but Warren stopped him, emphasizing that her question was not about low-level leadership but about the people at the top. Again, Stumpf's answer was no.
When Warren asked Stumpf if he knew how much the value of his bank's stock had gone up over the time that the unauthorized accounts were created and maintained, Stumpf replied the information was in the public record. "You're right, it is all in the public records," Warren said, "because I looked it up." She continued: "While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.75 million shares of Wells stock." The share price went up by about $30 in that time frame, Warren pointed out, "which comes out to more than $200 million in gains, all for you personally."
Warren ended her speech by calling on Stumpf to resign and for both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the CEO. Here's an excerpt of her speech:
You know, here's what really gets me about this, Mr. Stumpf. If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the cash drawer, they'd probably be looking at criminal charges for theft. They could end up in prison. But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket. And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses, and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich. This is about accountability. You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.
You can watch Warren's full questioning above.
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VIDEO: Elizabeth Warren just gave Wells Fargo's CEO a lesson he won't soon forget. Now she's pushing for a criminal investigation.Yesterday, the CEO of Wells Fargo sat in front of the Senate Banking Committee and tried to blame low-level employees making $12 an hour for one of the most widespread frauds we’ve ever seen.Elizabeth Warren wasn’t having any of it.She told him what prosecutors should have said months ago: he should resign, give back his bonuses, and face criminal charges.This is why we elected Senator Warren—to stand up to Wall Street fraudsters. Now she's pushing for criminal investigations, and with all the press coverage she's getting after yesterday's hearing there's real momentum.John Stumpf, the CEO of Wells Fargo, is the #1 highest paid bank CEO in the country. And yet he claims that only low-level employees should be held accountable for a scam his company was running for at least 5 years, affecting millions of accounts.Here’s what happened: Wells Fargo created over two million bogus bank and credit card accounts using their customers’ personal information without their knowledge. When customers started getting hit with overdraft fees and late charges on accounts they didn't even know existed, Wells Fargo saw their profits soar.The Los Angeles Times first uncovered the scam in 2013, but government investigators have found that it continued right up until this year.As a result of the scandal, Wells Fargo has fired over 5,000 low level employees -- and not one single member of senior leadership.Senator Warren is pushing hard for the SEC and Justice Department to prosecute the executives who oversaw and profited from Wells Fargo's fraud.Thanks for being a bold progressive. And for supporting this bold progressive who does us proud -- Senator Elizabeth Warren.-- Keith Rouda, PCCC organizer
Want to support the Warren wing? Senator Elizabeth Warren says, "When PCCC members donate millions in small-dollar donations and make millions of phone calls for progressive candidates, leaders in Washington, they take notice." Chip in $3 here.Elizabeth Warren Just Humiliated Donald Trump With Two Perfect Tweets
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Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is in the hot seat. Last week his bank was fined $185 million in penalties after employees subject to aggressive sales goals opened two million accounts without customers' knowledge, "often racking up fees or other charges," according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf started the year off on something of a throne. In January, the investment research firm Morningstar named him "CEO of the Year" for 2015, noting that he "guided the bank through a difficult period in the industry and shunned activities that put profits ahead of customers."Fast forward nine months, and Stumpf is on the hot seat instead. Last week, his bank was fined $185 million in penalties after employees, in effect, put money before customers. Subject to aggressive sales goals, some two million accounts opened by Wells Fargo workers may have been unauthorized, created without customers' knowledge and "often racking up fees or other charges," according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Federal prosecutors have reportedly launched an investigation into the company's sales tactics. The bank's stock has dropped 9 percent since the news hit. And Stumpf has been called to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, which is surely eager to hear him explain how Wells Fargo had fired 5,300 employees over a period of five years while the executive who ran the community banking unit has amassed compensation in vested stock, options and retirement benefits that, according to an analysis from Bloomberg, was valued at $90 million this past week.The past week of devastating headlines for the nation’s now second largest bank by market value -- in more bad news, it lost that crown to J.P. Morgan this week -- could deal a major blow to Wells Fargo’s reputation, say communications advisers and management professors. In the Wells Fargo scandal, they see a case study that illustrates the perils of aggressive sales goals — risky enough, in Wells Fargo's case, that the bank said it would eliminate them altogether starting Jan. 1. They point to the damage in trust that could be done to a brand that has sought to distinguish itself for its not-like-Wall-Street ways. And they question executives' initial comments about the company’s culture, which seemed to isolate bad actors from the corporate whole and shift the blame to low-level employees."There are not 5,000 bad apples," said Maurice Schweitzer, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies ethical decision-making. "It was as if whole-scale divisions of people were put under unrealistic expectations, [and] told to turn in numbers."Since news of the penalties erupted last week, Wells Fargo has taken out full-page ads in major newspapers including The Washington Post expressing its regret and taking "full responsibility." It said it has refunded customers' fees for unauthorized accounts. And it said it has improved its communication, training and compliance, adding steps to confirm account openings, and eliminating the product sales goals in retail banking.Yet experts in corporate reputation management questioned comments made by the bank's executives since news of the scandal hit. At a financial services conference in New York Tuesday, Wells Fargo CFO John Shrewsberry appeared to blame employees for the unauthorized accounts, saying "it was really more at the lower end of the performance scale, where people apparently were making bad choices to hang on to their job," according to CNBC. A Wall Street Journal article on Tuesday included a headline that said Stumpf "lays blame with bad employees," quoting him as saying "there was no incentive to do bad things" and that the bad behavior "in no way reflects our culture." Stumpf, the Journal explained, "initially wouldn’t comment on who was ultimately responsible for the practices and sales-driven culture."The report noted that Stumpf later said, through a spokesperson, that "I feel accountable and our leadership team feels accountable," remarks he echoed in an interview with The Washington Post and with CNBC's Jim Cramer. In the CNBC interview, Stumpf again said the unauthorized accounts were not representative of the company's culture, but started out the interview by apologizing."To the extent that we don't get it right 100 percent of the time," Stumpf said, " 'cause that's our goal -- if we don't make that plan, I'm responsible. I'm accountable."Melissa Arnoff, who leads the corporate reputation practice at the communications firm Levick, graded Wells Fargo's response as "starting off poorly, but getting better. The fact that [the CEO] waited so long to say anything at all -- and then the first thing [Stumpf] said is 'it's the employees fault?' Obviously, yes, it is the employees who created the accounts. But there's something wrong with the internal system if this went on for five years and involved at least 5,300 employees."Others pointed out the problems of trying to distance the company's overall culture from those who created the phony accounts. Irving Schenkler, a professor of management communication at New York University, said that if the finger is pointed too sharply at lower-level workers, it "could cause unintended consequences or backlash," sparking disgruntled employees to come forward or current workers to lose trust in leadership. "It could breed cynicism," he said.Richele Messick, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, said in an email that the company has made "substantial investments in additional monitoring and controls" and said that "we have made fundamental changes to help ensure team members are not being pressured to sell products, customers are receiving the right solutions for their financial needs, our customer-focused culture is upheld at all times and that customer satisfaction is high." In a follow-up phone call, she said "we have shared that we have been making changes to our processes, our controls, our training, our incentives for several years."Meanwhile, Anthony Johndrow, CEO of a reputation management advisory firm in New York, said that for banks like Wells Fargo, a reputation hit like the current scandal could be particularly damaging. The so-called "reputation gap" between how customers of a bank view the company and how non-customers view it is much wider than in other industries. Since the financial crisis, customers have gone from disliking banks in general but liking their own bank to hating the banks and being just okay with their own banker, he says. That makes the risk of losing the faith and trust of their own customers that much more serious."When you have a massive scandal like this, which basically puts Wells Fargo in the role of villain of their customers," he said, "you've really threatened that strength they have with their customers."One part of Wells Fargo's response that got better reviews was its decision to do away with its product-based sales goals. "Wow," said Lisa Ordóñez, a professor of management at the University of Arizona who studies goal-setting. At Wells Fargo, bank employees were pushed to "cross-sell" different types of accounts to customers, with goals of reaching as many as eight accounts per account holder, according to a complaint filed by the Los Angeles City Attorney. The complaint also said daily sales for each branch and each sales employee were "reported and discussed by Wells Fargo's district managers four times a day."An investigation by the Los Angeles Times into the sales practices back in 2013 reported that branch managers had to commit to 120 percent of daily numbers and tellers had to come up with at least 100 sales of financial services per quarter. Aggressive sales goals are frequently cited in anonymous employee reviews on Glassdoor.com, a career web site.One question, of course, is what will replace it. Decades of research have shown that it's effective to set specific, challenging goals for employees. But the potential downsides -- unethical behavior, distorted appetites for risk -- get far less attention, Ordóñez says, pointing to several recent scandals at organizations where audacious goals were set. From Volkswagen (where the "diesel-gate" scandal came amid a push to become the world's largest automaker) to the Veterans Administration (where a 14-day scheduling goalwas said to lead to widespread cheating) to Wells Fargo, Ordóñez said, "there's just example after example after example. If you set tough goals, and you don't monitor them, frankly, you're asking for this kind of behavior."Ordóñez has researched how multiple goals can wear people down over time, leading to greater unethical behavior. And she wrote a paper with Wharton's Schweitzer called "Goals Gone Wild" which argues that the "systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored."In any company, Schweitzer says, "when everybody to your left and right is turning in numbers you can’t possibly reach without cheating, and everybody’s getting rewarded for it, and your leadership’s basically telling you to turn in those numbers -- it takes a very unusual person to blow the whistle or not fall into that pattern."Of course, the next round of reviews for how Wells Fargo is managing its crisis will come next week, when Stumpf heads to Capitol Hill. While there, says Johndrow, he's likely to face the Catch-22 of responding to questions about what he knew and when. Saying he did know about the behavior would cause its own set of problems. Yet saying the opposite to a Senate committee, particularly for banks that have dealt with the "too big to fail" image for years, isn't much better. As Johndrow puts it: If Stumpf was "to say 'we're too big for me to be aware of this' -- it just doesn't work."Read also:
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