Make No Mistake, the Business Model Is Fraud We

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Make No Mistake, the Business Model Is Fraud

Wells Fargo distinguishes itself once more.



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By Charles P. Pierce

Nov 28, 2017

At this point, if you told me that Wells Fargo was running dope out of Marseilles, and responsible for the unsolved murder of Roger Rabbit, I’d probably believe you. Seriously, this latest malfeasance alleged against the company, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and relayed to the shebeen via The New York Daily News, is further proof that this particular respected financial institution is about three fedoras short of being the Gambino family.

The bank overcharged their corporate clients on foreign exchanges and levied hefty transactions fees through ingrained practices that rewarded employees for raking in the cash, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

If the companies questioned why the foreign exchange rates were higher than the ones they were initially offered by the bank, employees would simply chalk it up to the “time fluctuation,” saying the market rate changed by the time the transaction was executed, one former manager said. Companies were also charged unusually high fees for currency conversions — which employees blamed on the bank’s “automated” computer system.

Oh, come on. This is what a middle-schooler tells the teacher when a term paper is late.

Wells Fargo is still trying to repair its image after employees pressured by sales targets used fake pin numbers and bogus email addresses to open 3.5 million unauthorized accounts between 2009 and 2016.

The bank, which was previously upheld as an industry gold standard, was forced to pay regulators $185 million in the wake of the massive fraud scandal. Wells Fargo also forked over a $142 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit.

While Wells Fargo’s retail employees cited demanding quotas and a pressure-cooker environment in the fraud scandal, those in the bank’s foreign exchange operation pointed to the company’s bonus plan.

Alibis are many and varied, but all of them are embarrassing as hell.

The reward system, considered unusual for the industry, allowed bankers to take home 10% of the revenue topping the company’s set target, according to The Wall Street Journal. So if the target was $5 million, and a banker brought in $6 million, he or she would rake in an extra $100,000 cash bonus.

And so when corporations complained about transaction fees, which clocked in between 1% and 4% compared to the standard of 0.15% to 0.5%, employees had their excuses at hand, according to the WSJ.

Remember this the next time some sublet of Wells Fargo in the Congress spouts off about how our threadbare social safety net “incentivizes” sloth and deceit. You won’t have to wait long. You’re going to hear a lot of it as that abomination of a tax bill works its way into law, and even more of it when these clucks try to pass a budget without closing the government for the holidays.



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Needless to say, this is an inconvenient story to pop just as the president* has installed useful tool Mick Mulvaney to overseethe neutering and eventual destruction of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

(One of the more intriguing arguments lodged recently against the CFPB—and, unfortunately, the otherwise sharp Stephanie Ruhle passed it along on Monday—is that it didn’t ferret out the first huge Wells Fargo fraud, but that The Los Angeles Times did.

By this logic, once Woodward and Bernstein published their first story, the FBI and the DOJ should’ve gone out of business.)

This is the way that the financial sector of our economy does business. They nearly wrecked the world, and they learned nothing.

At this point, I am convinced that, even had the Obama administration run every one of these people into the federal pokey, business as usual would have gone merrily on.

Oh, look, Mick Mulvaney himself picked up $6,000 from Wells Fargo in 2016, and 4G’s in 2014, and two-grand in 2012. I guess the computers must’ve been back up .

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