Saturday, September 24, 2016

Republican senators outraged by Wells Fargo’s fraud want to eliminate the agency that uncovered it

Matthew Yglesias · Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 3:18 pm

A funny thing happened in the United States Senate today, as a chorus of cross-party agreement broke out during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on revelations that Wells Fargo employees created hundreds of thousands of fraudulent bank accounts and credit cards in order to meet company targets for cross-selling new products to existing customers. The targets were extremely aggressive — so aggressive that they couldn’t actually be met — so thousands of employees responded by faking it.

Wells Fargo is paying $185 million in fines and fired more than 5,000 rank-and-file employees, but so far nothing has been done to personally punish the high-level executives who reap the rewards when the company performs well.

Senators today weren’t having it, with banker scourge Elizabeth Warren telling Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf that he ought to resign and face personal investigation. She described his failure to take responsibility as “gutless leadership” and said we may need “tough new laws” to hold executives personally accountable for their misdeeds.

.@SenWarren is right: "The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds.”

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 20, 2016
Warren, as you might expect, is on the leftward flank of the panel.

But it featured a surprising level of bipartisan agreement, with committee chair Richard Shelby, a hard-right Alabama Republican, accusing Stumpf in his opening statement of personally fostering “a corporate culture that drove company ‘team members’ to fraudulently open millions of accounts using their customers’ funds and personal information without their permission.”

And yet Shelby, along with his fellow Banking Committee Republicans, is committed to eliminating the entire agency that discovered the wrongdoing in the first place.

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