State prosecutors in California are investigating Wells Fargo on allegations of criminal identity theft and false impersonation, opening up another front in the scandal over faked accounts at the bank. …
In an affidavit, James Hirt, special agent supervisor in the California Department of Justice, wrote: “There is probable cause to believe that employees of Wells Fargo Bank unlawfully accessed the bank’s computer system to obtain the PII [personally identifiable information] of customers.
“The bank’s employees then used the unlawfully obtained customers’ PII to commit false impersonation and identity theft by opening unauthorised accounts, credit cards, and various other products that resulted in the accumulation of fees and charges for Wells Fargo.”
http://www.ft.com/content/3a1e0128-964b-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b
That’s nice. But aren’t the Feds supposed to do something?
It’s hard to find a more clear-cut case of securities fraud. Stumpf verbally praised cross-selling metrics to investors when he, by his own admission, knew that those metrics were flawed, underwritten by fake accounts. He never corrected the record, and Wells Fargo to this day has never changed a word of its SEC filings. …
If the SEC and the Justice Department don’t get involved here, they might as well not even exist. … Attorney General Loretta Lynch, if she wants to emerge from wherever she’s been hiding on this issue, has enough information to bring cases.
Will President Barack Obama’s administration end its tenure as it began, by refusing to prosecute systemic fraud in the financial markets? That’s the unavoidable conclusion so far.
http://newrepublic.com/article/136977/obama-administration-must-prosecute-wells-fargo
He has 90 days to prove them wrong. I’m not holding my breath.
Your FT link didn’t work for me – use this one: California prosecutors open new front in Wells Fargo scandal
Doubt the CA DOJ will come down too hard on Wells as it seems to be the remaining large CA based bank. All the others gobbled up over the decades because we seemed not to have learned what happens when banks become monopolies.
There were other stakeholders as well back then that served an unofficial oversight function. Bill (technically by boss’s, boss’s boss), in a meeting with the senior management of Crocker Bank, didn’t hesitate to tell them that Crocker was the worst run bank in California. As Bill was retelling this to me, I said, “You didn’t, did you?” He replied, “It’s true isn’t it?” Me, “Yes, but it’s a client.” Bill, “Not anymore. That hundred year relationship ended today.” Crocker didn’t survive for long a few after that — Wells bought it.
Imagine for a moment George Bush and Republicans getting away with Holder and Lynch type AGs for these 8 yrs of continuing impunity.
Wells Fargo is a corp that needs to DIE… pour encourager les autres.
Think Kamala is just getting press out of it?
Imagine for a moment George Bush and Republicans getting away with Holder and Lynch type AGs for these 8 yrs of continuing impunity.
iirc, no imagination required. We’ve knowingly lived it through two administrations. Perhaps three because there were a large number of prosecutions during the Reagan/Bush years which gave the appearance that those administrations were particularly corrupt. Didn’t consider that perhaps there were enough old school investigators and prosecutors in various USG agencies still around at that time and doing their jobs. Many would have been retiring in the late eighties/early nineties and their replacements would have been new school and highly partisan.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/bill-black-bank-of-england-says-authorities-mustnt-fine-banks
-because-groaf.html
Ponder this from Haldane:
“Andrew Haldane, widely regarded as one of the most original and astute economists of his generation. In a Haldane paper I’ve cited often, The $100 Billion Question, Haldane treat the cost of periodic financial crises as an externality, just like pollution. The correct remedies, depending on the level of social costs versus private gain, are taxes or other costs to make the actual cost of the product reflect the true societal cost, or prohibition. With a simple back of the envelope workup, Haldane demonstrates that the the cost of financial crises are so high that making the banks bear them would wipe them out. In other words, banking as now constituted is destructive from the standpoint of the community as a whole. It is purely predatory. That means aggressively restricting bank risk-taking (prohibition) and regulating them so they operate as utilities is the preferred approach.
Plutocrats Brag: We Win Because You Fail to Vote
(Bill Black) http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/10/plutocrats-brag-win-fail-vote.html
Grrrrrr.