With a company like Wells Fargo that's moving from scandal to scandal I wonder when is it enough and we should just close the company? They repeatedly have demonstrated that they are not able to engage in ethical business practices.
What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?
Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.
Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.
I wouldn't consider a local bank or a credit union, because I like being able to find a branch anywhere in the country, and small/local financial institutions are not exempt from bad behavior either. They also tend to have significantly inferior online banking and mobile apps.
Closing my account would just mean moving from one amoral giant bank to another.
No online check sending, no mobile check deposit, very few ATMs, doesn't accept Zelle, and doesn't integrate with Mint (Mandatory 2FA issues). I miss the BoA features and regret the move.
Wrong. Many credit unions are in a co-op shared network.
Because we have decided that it's easier for everybody if we set standards for businesses so we can trust them to act ethically. When you go to a restaurant you generally can be confident that you won't get poisoned. So if you are a Wells Fargo customer you should be able to trust that you don't get screwed over.
It's not realistic to put the burden of monitoring business practices on the individual person. If you ever have dealt with buying a house or medical stuff you should know that understanding the transactions completely would probably be a full time job. That's why we have regulations and laws so people can spend their time more productively.
I think the point the OP is making is that when the regulatory regime fails to protect customers by taking action against a company with such frequent and glaring violation there is something that can be done as a last resort - voting with your feet.
Clearly regulators haven't instilled any real fear into this toxic dump of a bank.
Maybe that's less growth than they would have gotten.. but it's definitely not a penalty. Just a complete failure by consumers to hold the bank accountable.
https://www08.wellsfargomedia.com/assets/pdf/about/investor-...
But at least the fed is putting a cap on their growth now: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wells-fargo-fed/fed-o...
I assume it'd never be triggered from above due to "a series of scandals" as long as operations remained viable.
Monopolies that are too big to fail are the natural end state of laissez-faire capitalism -- but we don't have to accept that. We can insist that our government break up monopolies.