Exhibit 4,294,967,296 of why all of these TBTF banks should have been orderly winded down instead of bailed out.
I closed my WF accounts when all of their shenanigans came to light but their still one of the very biggest.
I was in a branch of my (not very large, so not really expected to be multilingual) credit union here in Seattle about a month ago and a branch employee was walking a middle-age-appearing couple through switching their automatic debits and direct deposit and such to the account they’d recently opened. And he was doing it in German.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-confessions-of-judgm...
There are plenty of viable alternatives if you don’t demand your bank to be one of the 5 largest.
This is why I closed my Wells Fargo account after 10 years. It used to be that you could walk into a bank, sit down with a banker, and have them solve any problem you had. Now you walk into the bank, sit down with a banker, and the banker picks up a phone and dials 1-800-WELLSFARGO for you and hands you the phone. It's absolutely insane. I switched to a local small bank that knows me by name and can fully complete the process for their entire range of services within a single office, face to face, by email, or direct office line at any time.
About the only thing I miss is the ability to send foreign wires. For that Discover bank online checking does that.
It’s honestly a much better experience that when I had my old WF account.
Since American Express in the UK outsourced their live chat to the Phillipines and India, I’m not even bothering with using it.
https://investors.rbs.com/share-data/equity-ownership-statis...
The fact that banks take taxpayer bailout money should not change this -- demanding that a bank prefer local employees over less expensive foreign employees will make it less efficient and therefore less competitive at a time when it is already weak, which is counter to the bailout's central purpose of saving the bank.
The banks coexist with Federal agencies that underwrite, protect and regulate savings and mortgages. They aren't food delivery startups. This is why many nations have the notion of "chartered" banks - to recognize that the banks aren't just yet-another corporation.
Once the banks accepted bailouts, they accepted a new mission. Same with GM - it effectively became a temporary jobs program once the government started underwriting it.