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How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

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Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#91
post #61
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you live in the West you live in a free market right now. > nobody (in) civilization has really ever lived under what is technically a free market. So, we do or we don't?

You do live in a free market. You don't live in a free market by a definition including no interference from government. But that's a dumb and useless definition so it's tossed out here.

"A free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority."

Most, if not all Western countries are not free markets. They are often partially free, but definitely not completely free. And there are very few countries in the world right now, if any, which have a free market.

So no, he doesn't live in a free market.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

How is it fraud? No one told them to make fake accounts. Even the most naive person knows that making a fake account is wrong. 5000 people did the wrong thing. To me it seems like people are blaming the top for widespread moral bankruptcy at the bottom.

I'm sure you've heard that ignorance of the law is no excuse right? Similar principle works here. No way the CEO did not know what was going on if 1000's of his subordinates were doing it. Saying that he couldn't have known is negligent. Personally I do not buy the story that he did not know. Come on for fucks sake, Trump just got elected on virtually pure lies and you are still being stupidly naive. This CEO knew.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" Wells Fargo hay have put an arbitration clause somewhere buried in their fine print; however, "binding" is what would be questioned by the courts. Probably pretty easy to refute its bind-ability, given that WF has negated and demonstrated incompetence on its side of the contract duty: safeguarding the consumer's info. (Binding contracts require competent parties on both sides).…

The Supreme Court has upheld binding arbitration agreements in the last few years, and unfortunately "demonstrating incompetence" isn't grounds for voiding this. There's also nothing here to indicate that customers or the bank were not "competent". There are certainly issues with the fraudulent accounts, but the entire relationship with the bank would likely be covered by the arbitration clause from the initial account setup (which the customer agreed to). Customers would have to show something along the lines of fraud in the inducement.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#94
post #3

Can we remove: -"Why x matters" -"What we know" -"Slammed" and -"Number x will shock you!" from all news headlines?

I wish. Newspapers seem to have decided that the best way to attract readers is to imitate the magazines that live near the supermarket checkout.

Can you blame them? It's ultimately driven by users. If we didn't click on these article titles, the publishers wouldn't use these ridiculous formats.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? The outcome was entirely predictable, and there is no way that a CEO of one of the country's largest banks doesn't understand the basic concept of economic incentives shaping people's behavior. Nothing personal because I'm sure you didn't intend to make things worse for everyone, but your attitude is exactly what's wrong with the US and with capitalism in general - the notion that once an organization is suf…

> Why not? Because prison is barbaric, and expensive and should be saved for hardened criminals. Nothing personal, but it's people like you who think throwing people in prison some kind of societal solution that we have overflowing prisons of petty criminals.

I'm not a fan of barbarism or prison in general, but actually I think that using your position at the apex of one of the world's leading banks to squeeze money out of people at the bottom of the pyramid* qualifies as criminality.

* Whether you consider the consumers or the low-level tellers who set up millions of shadow accounts to meet otherwise impossible performance goals to be the bottom layer, I think the point stands either way.

I'm perplexed by your use of the word 'hardened.' Perhaps you meant 'violent' but there are plenty of people in prison who had a clean record until they committed a violent crime of passion or suchlike, and likewise there are plenty of criminals whose criminality is unquestioned but who never engaged in any violent activity. Again you probably didn't intend this, but I can't help feeling that you're unconsciously making a class distinction between stereotypical blue collar heavies who help themselves or carry out break-ins, vs the sort of nice socially acceptable behavior of sitting at a desk signing corporate documents which will affect thousands or millions of people that the executive has never met and knows nothing about.

Look, I'm sure you just had some generic 'tough guy' in mind, but it's not like I'm demanding the guy get thrown into some hellhole and raped int he shower every day. I'd like if we could have humane prisons like some countries, far fewer people in them, and that they should form a representative cross-section of society.

Really, if you don't have some sort of institutional accountability then it just increases the incentives to do this sort of thing precisely because the upside benefits are so much larger than the downside risks. OK, Stumpf's professional reputation is in tatters and it's probably had a negative impact on his social life...but he can basically afford to spend the rest of his life on a yacht. People suffer worse consequences from divorce.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#96
post #88

In pushing for jail time for this particular CEO, Elizabeth Warren is barking up the wrong tree. Stumpf made mistakes in setting incentives and monitoring staff culture, but there is no evidence he committed fraud. The bank overcharged customers $2 million dollars and paid a $185 million settlement. That seems reasonable to me. More worryingly, the bank also seems to have harassed and blacklisted whistleblower employ…

Part (most?) of the damage isn't contained in the numbers you cited. Wells Fargo used customer identities to apply for and open credit cards, which could have affected their credit scores and thus potentially the interest rates they paid on loans (that could be a lot for something like a mortgage). It's hard to know what the dollar figure of this is, but it probably raises the damages a little bit.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#98
post #71
post #37

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…

Most libertarians agree that fraud should be illegal, and that customers should be able to press criminal and civil charges if fraud is perpetrated against them. In this case, the bank charged customers for services they never requested. That is fraud. It has nothing to do with "free markets" as defined by libertarians. If you find some libertarian scholarship, you will also notice that libertarians see contract enfo…

+1 for this. Libertarians are not against laws. In fact contract enforcement is arguably the most important law.

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit he resinged! at 63, he's the oldest ceo of all the top 5 banks. Stumpf did't resign, he retired!

Resinged is a nice way to put it. Once before the senate, then again before the house.

Sorry and not to be the grammar police but it's resigned...

Re: How Elizabeth Warren Took Down the CEO of Wells Fargo, and Why It Matters

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it fraud? No one told them to make fake accounts. Even the most naive person knows that making a fake account is wrong. 5000 people did the wrong thing. To me it seems like people are blaming the top for widespread moral bankruptcy at the bottom.

I'm sure you've heard that ignorance of the law is no excuse right? Similar principle works here. No way the CEO did not know what was going on if 1000's of his subordinates were doing it. Saying that he couldn't have known is negligent. Personally I do not buy the story that he did not know. Come on for fucks sake, Trump just got elected on virtually pure lies and you are still being stupidly naive. This CEO knew.

He is not going to jail because they did nothing illegal, and most likely didn't even have negative intent.

You are speaking like someone who has little experience with sales culture or sales incentive structures.

You also seem to be naive to the level of fraud, theft and lies that "working-class" people regularly commit. Get out of the kumbaya bubble and wake up to reality.

Workers do bad things all the time. They fired people when they caught them doing fraud. They never encouraged or enabled people to do fraud. They should have pushed for stronger top-down communication to state that they are investigating it and shutting it down.

I'm not saying these guys are angels. I'm saying that people are blowing this out of proportion comparing it to Enron.

That's my 2 cents. Take it or leave it.

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