81–90 of 159 posts
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>>Fine. Then the company should get the "death penalty" and be liquidated. Exactly. After all, corporations are people right? So let's actually treat them like we treat people.
You kill people that rob other people? Where are you from?
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In a "perfect free market", customers have access to all of the information required to make the decision, and can make an informed choice on the products and services they buy and sell based on their circumstances. That wasn't the case in this situation. Customers didn't have all of the information, and as a result, were taken advantage of. In regards to the specific fraud component (signing up customers to services…
Of course, basically all economic theory is predicated on the assumption that information is basically free and widely available. In reality, this is simply not the case - information is either not free, or it is time-consuming to acquire (and therefore not free in another sense). As soon as one understands this a lot of free market ideology stops making sense and things like Consumer Production Bureaus start to soun…
Can she and other senators question and bring down Trump if he does something illegal?
I absolutely love Senator Warren. That being said, the notion that the stock price of Wells Fargo could be significantly impacted by this scheme (which is central to Ms. Warren's argument) is not well founded. Wells Fargo makes 86 billion in revenue per year. Even if 10 million accounts were made and each made a thousand dollars -- (incredibly generous) ... over the course of 5 years this accounts for 1 billion in re…
Oh come on, talk about sugar coating it!!! If you create crazy incentives of course it is FRAUD! If it wasn't CEOs could wash their hands of every possible fraud they might imagine by simply setting the right incentives to get the fraud done. You got an economy were people are lucky to hold onto a job and you are threatening them with getting fired if they don't meet your insane goals? That is like a tortured person answering whatever the torturer asks.
We see this stuff happening again and again. This is the new way of committing fraud. Engineer it so that the poor suckers at the bottom have to take all the heat. The poor suckers who have no golden parachute to fall back on when they are kicked out.
When you got 5000 employees caught doing this, the alarm bells should be ringing and you should realize you did something wrong instead of firing everybody. 5000 employees aren't all rotten apples who did something for their own gain. They gained nothing and put their reputation and job on the line for this so top management could line their pockets.
Makes me sick.
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I can't speak for all libertarians, but I consider myself a libertarian and I can make some observations about this whole situation.. 1. Those customers who were stolen from will get to participate in the mother of all class-action lawsuits. The settlement will be outlandish. Juries hate huge corporations that screw the little guy, and the lawyers on both sides know it. If you don't trust the class action to provide…
> 1. Those customers who were stolen from will get to participate in the mother of all class-action lawsuits. The settlement will be outlandish. Juries hate huge corporations that screw the little guy, and the lawyers on both sides know it. Nope, since they have a mandatory binding arbitration clause. See http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/business/wells-fargo-asks-... .
"mandatory binding arbitration clause"
(Binding contracts require competent parties on both sides).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat...
What do the libertarians say about this theft? While I understand the idea of the free market, I don't see how that would have protected the consumer in this case. The CEO has millions of times the power of the average consumer, and can harness thousands of people to his agenda. The consumer is left to either (a) pay the "idiot" tax of being stupid enough to sign up for a thieving bank, or (b) rely on the government…
If you live in the West you live in a free market right now. Asking the "libertarians" what they would do about this incident in the "free market" is a deceptive thing to say. Not only does it ignore the fact that we live in a free market, it unjustly pins the failings of the system we live in on a philosophy which has a wide array of different nuances and subgroups. Libertarians range from anarcho-capitalists, to so…
Just look at the ridiculous situation with patents, trademarks and copyrights. All of them have long outgrown their original intention and has been so amplified and extended that they can be used to very effectively kill all smaller competition and milk consumers dry.
The argument that government is horrible has been used effectively again and again to make government horrible. Is has been stripped of cash to work effectively and become completely dependent on largess from the private enterprise to function. That attracts the most rotten people as politicians, thus ensuring that government never looks good. The last thing these people want is a well functioning government.
I absolutely love Senator Warren. That being said, the notion that the stock price of Wells Fargo could be significantly impacted by this scheme (which is central to Ms. Warren's argument) is not well founded. Wells Fargo makes 86 billion in revenue per year. Even if 10 million accounts were made and each made a thousand dollars -- (incredibly generous) ... over the course of 5 years this accounts for 1 billion in re…
"These guys definitely made a mistake. It wasn't calculated fraud. It was bad incentive setting. Politicians like Warren don't intuitively understand how hard it is to actually control a group of thousands of middle-class workers and get them to do things.It is not easy to govern" Oh come on, talk about sugar coating it!!! If you create crazy incentives of course it is FRAUD! If it wasn't CEOs could wash their hands…
More worryingly, the bank also seems to have harassed and blacklisted whistleblower employees. No doubt it will have to pay a hefty settlement and class-action lawsuits, but again the CEO is guilty only failing to monitor bank culture. There was nothing malicious or criminal in his actions.
The number of fake accounts created by the bank - 1.5 million! - is irrelevant. I run a business and can create a billion customer accounts in seconds without harm to anyone else. What matters is how much damage the bank did to others - in this case the bank has already paid a fine proportional to that damage.
Instead of going after a hapless CEO and a company that has already paid a huge settlement for a relatively small error, Elizabeth Warren should focus her attention on banks which overinflated the value of their mortgages before selling them on to other banks or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In such cases we're talking a fraud involving billions of dollars, that led to worldwide financial recession, and where perhaps the CEO had direct knowledge of the fraud.
[Disclosure: I own shares in Wells Fargo]
I appreciate that Warren didn't let Stumpf talk his way out of taking any responsibility for the actions of his employees and made a clear argument as to why he should be held accountable. Unfortunately, it seems the primary reason he resigned was because the public outrage was loud enough. It seems that until CEOs are personally held accountable via fines or prison (as Warren suggests) we won't see a very big change…
Anyone who has worked in a company of any size knows it'd be down near impossible to know the inner working at all levels of the organization. So, yes, the guy is accountable and needs to lose his job. But the idea that he should go to prison for something like this is ludicrous.
I doubt the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will survive the upcoming Trump/Republican attack on federal regulatory agencies.