Wells Fargo uncovers up to 1.4M more fake accounts
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Needless to say, Wells Fargo has pretty much been filling its own page in ways that no other company has been able (with the exception of Uber): https://suitocracy.com/company/wells-fargo
Seeing it all laid out like that really makes me wonder how it still gets by with so few consequences.
Too big to fail. Check out the book "Chickenshit Club" if you want to see how this has all evolved since Enron and Arthur Andersen. The Justice Department is frequently paralyzed by politics and fear of causing economic harm to the country. Plus, several changes in legal precedents have made it much more difficult to prosecute companies and their executives.
https://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizat...
Lobbying and campaign donations, combined with executives going through the revolving door between government and corporate employment.
She said they were the most corrupt orgs she had worked with. Specifically, the Wachovia Construction Loan dept - then later Wells...
All corrupt.
I'm no longer a moral fan of his, sorry to say. I know he goes on record as saying he "pays less in tax than his secretary" (not an exact quote) but I think that's just a smart tactic to avoid public critique of his actions (and instead distract with nice words).
“I’ve had this rash on my genitals...”
“SDCs!”
Ah, see, there's where our POVs differ. My tack is that we've been "almost there" on things like speech and hand writing recognition for twenty years or so, and I wouldn't say we're "there" enough that I'd want a comparably competent system driving my car down the road. Adding to that is that from what I'm reading we're not to the level of, say, Alexa yet for SDCs. OTOH, you make good points about the rates of progress in neural nets, so perhaps I'm wrong. Experience says that I'm just as wrong in one direction as the rest of the industry is wrong in the other, and reality will end up somewhere in the middle. So let's check back in ten years. :-)
But I wouldn't be shorting Berkshire Hathaway just yet regardless.
Every problem can be mapped to SDCs
Can I ask where you scrape them from? (Google News?) Is it possible to scrape past headlines from somewhere too, or do you just have to keep up with it every day?
For past news the only one I have been able to use is The Guardian's API, which is free for non-profits such as my Suitocracy project. It's... not great, but it's something. A start.
It's... not a sophisticated system. It misses some major stories, gives me a few false positives, and of course lots of duplicates from differing sources.
But compared to what I had before (basically, nothing) it's a million times better.
1. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made
Generally, this form of English can only be used by certain segments of business and society.
Even worse, though I remember the original video being a mere 14 seconds, it is still playing some nonsense. Does it just loop new video downloads until I close the tab? Is there no mercy for bandwidth? [/frustrated]
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
This is really a fucking cancer for web ads, I've been through it all and never got so angry apart from the pop-up era.
And then they wonder and plead as to why we use adblockers -- in my case, they actually killed the whole medium of 'mobile news reading'.
Blocks the video without breaking the page
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-create...
The full statement is 'A few bad apples spoil the barrel' - which comes from the concept that a rotting apple lets off ethylene gas which will cause the apples surrounding it to also turn.
This is probably a better analogy than intended for the companies that incorrectly use it since bad behavior spreads like a corrupting influence through an organization and fixing it would really require larger changes than just getting rid of a couple people.
I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that you can have a few thousand instances of "rot" without there being somewhere higher in the company it's being spread from. If 1% of the company is "rotting", then something in leadership is "rotting".
The analogy is apt, but the question is identifying the bad apples - and asking if those on top are the bad apples spoiling the barrel.
None of them work for Wells Fargo anymore, and most have moved onto tech management or recruiter roles in the area. I'm not close friends but we're still in the same social circles, and I haven't heard of repercussions impacting them.
It's sad really. It seems to me that the whole Wells Fargo scandal is ultimately a lesson about how this company abused their employees and set them impossible tasks like "each customer should have X credit cards and Y accounts."
But that's not what people seem to have taken from it. Instead, the whole incident has been presented as "just another big bank defrauding its customers." In reality though, the goal of the fraud was not to enrich anyone, it was just for these employees to keep their jobs.
It feels like this whole incident could have spurred a conversation about the toxicity of these kind of unrealistic sales goals that provide no benefit to the customer, but it didn't.
Some Uber drivers literally have criminal records for driving for Uber, Uber even recruited and paid bonuses for drivers to unknowingly leave counties where they were operating legally to counties they were violating the law, think anyone from Uber corporate is going to jail anytime soon?
Where?
If this were a Democratic administration, or a rational Republican one, I'd say, it's time for the FDIC (too bad Sheila Bair's no longer its head) to come in, take over, and sell off Wells Fargo.
And that we have a Savings and Loan type investigation and prosecution, flipping the smaller fish until we get to the top and lock them up. (And strip them of their ill-gotten personal assets.)
At this point, shareholders should be well informed as to where their growth and profits are coming from. If they want to invest in such behavior, they should equally reap the results, in financial terms.
In other, if currently unrealistically ideal words, "No one is above the law."
At some point, you have to act to effectively put the brakes on such behavior. Otherwise, it takes over.
In this case, there is no defining line between the two major parties. They both rely heavily on bank lobbyists and come from their stock. There's going to be no changes.
#1) but you didn't when it was a democratic administration
#2) why does the party of the president determine what you would say?
The history of too big to fail is littered with discarded ethics and increasing moral hazard on both sides of the aisle (80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s).
It's a good point about "administration", too. I used it as a poor and incorrect stand-in for "majority".
At this point in time, I see some sort of corrective action as more likely from the Democratic side or from those Republicans who do not equate "conservative" with an ideology of personal greed and self-interest. For one point, systemic criminal behavior that also abuses your customer base, does not tend to conserve the institution -- unless it is or is granted quasi-monopoly status where those affected have no means of redress -- nor perhaps meaningful, better alternatives (e.g. an oligarchy of corruption, such as existed in the mortgage and mortgage-backed-securities market leading up to the 2008 crash).
Anyway, yeah, I fear even more our chances in the face of "the majority's" drive to neuter and dismantle existing law and regulation. But I don't believe either side has had too much interest in substantially, not to mention fully, addressing these problems. Not since..... Well, I guess since Carter. And the now seemingly anomalous prosecution of the Savings and Loan scandal in the latter '80's.
Mine's a rather limited perspective. But the string of incidents -- story after story about institutions getting off with fines that pale in comparison to their profits (those at the expense of often massive externalized costs) -- seems pretty apparent.
And actual jail time, as a result of the Savings and Loan malfeasance, did seem to at least produce a "tap on the brakes", for a short time.
Our government granted Wells Fargo’s corporate charter, and it can take it away.
Ever since the "collapse" of the over-leveraged and irresponsible firms relying on subprime mortgages and BS credit swaps to boost their stock prices, the government is scared to death to allow anything like that to happen again.
It would take far more than silly accounting fraud to do that, unfortunately.
This Wells Fargo Addendum constitutes a legal agreement between you, Stripe, and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., Canadian Branch (“Wells Fargo”).
Then, I googled "Wells Fargo Canada" and found their website: http://www.wellsfargo.ca/locations
The first sentence on their website is: Our team in Canada is dedicated exclusively to mid-sized and larger companies.
> This Wells Fargo Addendum constitutes a legal agreement between you, Stripe, and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and Wells Fargo Merchant Services, L.L.C. (collectively, “Wells Fargo”).
Presumably the 1.4M newly discovered fake accounts had some characteristics which they didn't look for on their first pass. Maybe the paperwork to create the account was signed, but it was all signed by the same bank employees rather than by customers. Maybe the paperwork to create one account got photocopied and submitted as the paperwork to create other accounts. You get the idea...
The total damages done to wells custormers are in the low millions, while wells fargo makes upwards of 20 billion a year. What I'm saying is it's a product of a bad incentive system--not criminal master planning by the managements to raise profits.
The fake accounts were used to make money for managers and executives at Wells Fargo by convincing shareholders, regulators and the company itself that performance was better than in reality.
The victims of this type of fraud are not just the directly impacted consumers, whose damages are not just measured in unwanted fees but also in their damaged credit histories. The bank itself is also a victim -- which means unrelated customers who store their money, stock market investors, and the general public who may have some relationship with Wells Fargo through multiple degrees of separation. Just looking at the bank's misappropriated profits hardly tells the whole story of systemic and pervasive fraud.
This was the execution of evil master planning by management, which included indirect rather than direct instruction. They knew that what they rewarded would get done, no matter the law.
The difference is just that you're stealing from your employer, instead of your employer's customers.