Wells Fargo’s ‘Living Will’ Plan Is Rejected Again by Regulators
There are widely-corroborated allegations that Wells Fargo&#x27;s flagship retail division had their junior employees open <i>millions</i> of unauthorized accounts&#x2F;financial products.  <i>Thousands</i> of employees that did not play along were either fired or both fired and permanently burned with the self-regulating body FINRA.  Employees who refused to engage in fraud were fired &quot;for cause&quot; and all anyone searching for their publicly-available disciplinary record with FINRA saw that they were fired for &quot;not following directions&quot; or somesuch.<p>Wells Fargo settled this issue with some regulatory bodies by either admitting or not contesting the charges and paying record fines.  But they did not settle with <i>all</i> of their regulators.<p>These crimes are heinous enough to warrant a RICO case against WF. Many C-suite people plainly knew and encouraged or stood silent and should go to jail.<p>Due to the size of WF and the length of time it has gone on, this cancerous culture has spread, to some degree, to every other retail bank, but we can still eliminate individuals who are obviously morally corrupt using a very simple filter.  The entire mid- and senior-level leadership of WF Retail for the affected time period from Branch Manager on up should be barred from ever working in banking again.  WF only promoted people who actively and enthusiastically engaged in fraud and we should have little sympathy or compassion for people like that.<p>The retail bank should have its banking license revoked, which would result in the entire holding company being pushed into bankruptcy and the non-retail divisions sold off in a (semi)orderly fashion, if only to make an example to the rest of the industry.  Great care should be taken that this doesn&#x27;t turn into a Lehman-level fiasco that imperils the entire economy, but the punishment should fit the crime, and, at the minimum, bondholders should lose money.  That is really the only way we can save our modern capitalism from itself.