Why Does Wells Fargo Still Exist? (The bank isn't just "too big to fail." It's too big to fix.)

Wells Fargo executives know that everyone hates them. In the last two years, the bank has launched three separate marketing campaigns hoping to clean up its public image, only to see each effort thwarted by fresh, catastrophic scandals ― like wrongly repossessing 27,000 cars and foreclosing on 400 families for no reason.

The bank’s latest quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission dedicates more than 2,000 words to “Additional Efforts To Rebuild Trust,” listing “automobile lending,” “mortgage interest rate lock extensions,” “consumer deposit account freezing/closing,” “certain activities within wealth and investment management,” “foreign exchange business,” “fiduciary and custody account fee calculations,” “mortgage loan modifications,” and “add-on products” as areas where the company may have been improperly seizing large sums of money that belong to other people. That section is followed by over 4,250 words on major legal liabilities the bank is currently facing.

Wells Fargo is even scamming rich people now, according to recent Yahoo Finance reporting, by intentionally steering high-net-worth clients into unnecessary products with high fees.

To any reasonable person, Wells Fargo is a rolling disaster ― a ripoff, wrapped in a swindle, inside a bank. And yet to a Wall Street investor, Wells Fargo looks like a pretty good bet. The bank has reported a combined $39.1 billion in profit since the final quarter of 2016. The Federal Reserve recently approved a 10 percent increase in the quarterly dividend the bank pays to its shareholders, allowing those profits to be converted into straight cash for its owners.

Wells Fargo’s very existence, not to mention its continued profitability, is an indictment of two decades of embarrassing regulatory oversight from four separate administrations...

I read the whole thing, thank you for the post. Wells Fargo was my bank in northern CA when they first got started in 1980 or so? I loved them, they had great posters of their wagons and huge horses in all these beautiful America scenes.

When I became a Realtor I learned more and more about certain banks, especially when working with them on home loans, Wells Fargo, one of the worst, too many ridulousl stories to tell. Eventually would not sell a home to a buyer that insisted on using Wells Fargo, I would walk away.

Last year, after they got caught setting up all the fake accounts, I noticed we had stock in the company, our broker had bought. I called him and told him, come on man I don't want to have anything to do with that bank, if I would not sell a house to someone using them, why in hell would I want to own the company, long pause, I will sell it.

My family was a longtime Wachova customer, dating back to the '40s, and the customer of a then-local Midwest wealth manager in the '60s. My own accounts were with First Interstate Bank and Wachova. Swoosh, my family, and I personally, ended up customers of Wells Fargo. It's been a mixed experience.

At one point, after all the mergers and stuff, I took out an auto loan with WF: $3,000, and I paid it off early. Oops, they said they lost the title to my car...and refused to pay the title replacement fee. After several weeks of insisting, I did get an official letter from then saying that they had lost the title, and quitclaim the lien on the vehicle. DMV gave me zero hassle about issuing a new clean title, given I had that letter.

I moved all my personal accounts to another bank.

The wealth fund is still with Wells Fargo Advisers, managed by the broker that originally set up the account with my parents. I examine the annual summaries very, very closely; so far, I've not seen any churn in my stock holdings. Moreover, the value of the portfolio has gone up as the stock market lifted. I've still not received a good answer from a potential new broker about how much moving my portfolio would cost; my tax adviser warned me that I could take a fairly good-sized haircut on the transfer. So I sit and watch carefully.

I also watch my credit reports to see if anything new had been added. So far, I've been lucky.

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