Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 439 posts

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#361

Post by dingo_bat »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #352
kaizendad wrote: post #19

OK, but Wells Fargo made $5 billion last year, and the activity they were fined for took place over many years, which leaves me to ask: after the fines, was this activity profitable or not? If it was profitable, do the fines actually dissuade future dishonesty? Also, apparently Wells Fargo thinks that 27,000 people lost their cars over this. I bet none of those people will be made whole. Cars are really essential thi…

Fines don’t seem to be preventing these cheats from ripping off consumers. When a bank cheats its customers, they should be prohibited from providing those services for several years. Shut down their mortgage division and force them to sell it off. That is the only real penalty that has teeth.

What about the people currently having a mortgage with the bank? You wouldn't want to hurt them.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#362

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

dingo_bat wrote: post #361
MichaelApproved wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fines don’t seem to be preventing these cheats from ripping off consumers. When a bank cheats its customers, they should be prohibited from providing those services for several years. Shut down their mortgage division and force them to sell it off. That is the only real penalty that has teeth.

What about the people currently having a mortgage with the bank? You wouldn't want to hurt them.

Don’t banks generally bundle and sell mortgages anyway?

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#363

Post by chiefalchemist »

kaizendad wrote: post #19

OK, but Wells Fargo made $5 billion last year, and the activity they were fined for took place over many years, which leaves me to ask: after the fines, was this activity profitable or not? If it was profitable, do the fines actually dissuade future dishonesty? Also, apparently Wells Fargo thinks that 27,000 people lost their cars over this. I bet none of those people will be made whole. Cars are really essential thi…

Will fines dissuade future dishonesty? Not likely. But jail time of the guilty decision makers would.

Steal a candy bar? Go to jail. Knowingly ruin someone's life? No problem. The shareholders pay for it.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#364

Post by freddie_mercury »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #363
kaizendad wrote: post #19

OK, but Wells Fargo made $5 billion last year, and the activity they were fined for took place over many years, which leaves me to ask: after the fines, was this activity profitable or not? If it was profitable, do the fines actually dissuade future dishonesty? Also, apparently Wells Fargo thinks that 27,000 people lost their cars over this. I bet none of those people will be made whole. Cars are really essential thi…

Will fines dissuade future dishonesty? Not likely. But jail time of the guilty decision makers would. Steal a candy bar? Go to jail. Knowingly ruin someone's life? No problem. The shareholders pay for it.

Actually there is a lot of real world evidence that fines dissuade honesty.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#365

Post by PhasmaFelis »

heurist wrote: post #38
aphextron wrote: post #4

Something has happened to big banks along the way, where they no longer actually provide banking services to their customers. When I walk into a Wells Fargo branch now and sit down with a "banker" to take care of my accounts, it consists of sitting next to them while they call 1-800-WELLSFARGO for me and talk to a call center. There simply is no service anymore. I walked into my local branch to open up an IRA last we…

It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth. For instance, I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc - and automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part. I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with…

> It's definitely an industry ripe for rebirth.

I'm eagerly looking forward to Silicon Valley disrupters getting into banking and, somehow, making it even worse.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#366

Post by fleminra »

henrikschroder wrote: post #253
djsumdog wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deleted all my Mint stuff years ago just because of the security concerns. If you mention the security concerns on Hackernews, a Mint employee typically replies with a link to the wikipedia page on their patented security model. Still, I'd rather not type all my bank passwords into an Intuit website. I like your concept of the multiple credit/card style budgeting. That makes a lot of sense. There are even some of t…

> Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's somethin…

> Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways.

Citibank includes this code in the "SID" element in OFX generated by their "OFX Direct" service (i.e. https://www.accountonline.com/cards/svc/CitiOfxManager.do). I haven't seen it in the OFX from any other financial institution though. The codes are cataloged here: https://github.com/greggles/mcc-codes

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#368

Post by 013a »

edmccard wrote: post #237
013a wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One piece of it is actually regulation. When you're dealing with huge amounts of yellow tape and you have millions of customers, the overhead cost of providing services is absolutely sky high. Many of their clients don't even make them money; think of the Starbucks barista that has $1000 in checking and no savings. Sure they can turn some of that money around into interest, but the cost-per-customer of lawyers, compl…

>Every time they write a loan they are forced to provide the customer with a 200-page "book" of all the compliance and regulation surrounding that loan. This must vary by state; I recently took out a small loan from my local bank in Pennsylvania and the information I went home with came out to about 15 pages. >When you're dealing with huge amounts of yellow tape and you have millions of customers I thought the conven…

That is absolutely true. My meaning is that the big banks are the only banks that have survived all the regulation, and the only reason they can survive is because they're increasingly centralizing all of their operations and shitting on average customers who earn them essentially no money.

Re: Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines

#370

Post by wnevets »

dingo_bat wrote: post #361
MichaelApproved wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fines don’t seem to be preventing these cheats from ripping off consumers. When a bank cheats its customers, they should be prohibited from providing those services for several years. Shut down their mortgage division and force them to sell it off. That is the only real penalty that has teeth.

What about the people currently having a mortgage with the bank? You wouldn't want to hurt them.

fannie mae probably owns the mortgage anyway
Post reply on HN