by Jeff Sovern As we noted yesterday, on Tuesday, Wells Fargo CEO John G. Stumpf testified before the Senate Banking Committee about the Wells Fargo Customer Fraud Fiasco. Video is available here and Senator Elizabeth Warren's two rounds of questioning, by themselves, here. I have now listened to Mr. Stumpf's testimony, and I learned that Wells engaged in cross-selling to […]
Here. Excerpt: Republicans don’t like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They opposed the very idea of the watchdog when Elizabeth Warren first proposed its creation, and they have been trying to defang and defund it ever since Congress made her vision into a reality. * * * But CFPB is still facing heat from Republicans […]
A continuing issue in consumer protection is that disclosures may convey the required information, but consumers may ignore them, so they have no impact. The FTC held a workshop last week to look at how to test disclosures to make them more effective. Ad Law Access has posted a report on the Workshop, Beyond “Clear […]
The Washington Post had this report on yesterday's congressional hearing: The CEO of Wells Fargo faced accusations of fraud and calls for his resignation Tuesday from harshly critical senators at a hearing over allegations that bank employees opened millions of accounts customers didn’t know about to meet sales quotas. Members of the Senate Banking Committee […]
That's a point made in an op-ed in The Hill, Why Wells Fargo Got Away with It So Long by Public Citizen's Robert Weissman and AFR's Lisa Donner. The whole piece is worth reading, but here's an excerpt: [M]ore than three years ago, a Wells Fargo customer named David Douglas sued in California, contending that the bank's employees […]
Last week Florida’s Sun Sentinel published a three-part series about the Gulf Coast’s raw oyster industry and consumers who have been sickened or killed after consuming raw oysters containing Vibrio vulnificus, a type of bacteria that thrives in Gulf waters. The series describes how elected leaders in Gulf states distorted facts about the cost of […]
by Jeff Sovern Tomorrow, the Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on the Wells Fargo unauthorized accounts fiasco. The first witness will be Wells' Chairman and CEO, John G. Stumpf. I hope some Senator asks Mr. Stumpf about the Wells Fargo arbitration clause. Some class actions have already been filed against Wells, and Wells' […]
The Wall Street Journal reports: Prepaid cards, which started out as simple gift cards from retail stores, have morphed into popular financial-management tools with functions that rival bank checking accounts. Now regulators are playing catch-up, with plans to roll out a rule this fall that would bring oversight of the sector closer to regulations covering […]
Wells Fargo, the country’s largest retail bank and an institution once thought above the fray of financial crisis era scandals, has been under fire this week after acknowledging it had fired 5,300 employees over the past five years for opening as many as 2 million sham accounts customers didn’t ask for. The San Francisco-based bank, which […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has this blog post. The post notes that "over 90 percent of African-American and 72 percent of Latino students leave college with student loan debt, compared to 66 percent of white students and 51 percent of Asian-American students."