Courtesy of Barret Jackson Nye and Lee Reiners The scandal at Wells Fargo has placed big banks’ use of forced arbitration clauses under the microscope. When then Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee shortly after the scandal broke, he was asked by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) whether his… Read More »
In his book Stress Test, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner vividly describes the difficulty he encountered in trying to get the various federal financial regulators to go along with the Obama administration’s post-crisis regulatory reform agenda. In the summer of 2009, after the Treasury Department released the details of their proposal, regulators swarmed Capitol Hill… Read More »
Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of Wells Fargo’s community banking division, was required to forfeit $19 million in compensation after the company came under intense public scrutiny for opening over 2 million unauthorized customer accounts. From 2011 to 2016, while the bank was firing over 5,000 low-level branch employees for engaging in this fraud, it… Read More »
Courtesy of Elisabeth de Fontenay, G. Mitu Gulati and Josefin Meyer In the largest financial market in the world—the market for sovereign debt—the practice of listing on a stock exchange remains nearly ubiquitous today. All but a handful of the highest-rated sovereign nations (such as the United States) list their international bonds—that is, bonds expected… Read More »
Courtesy of Tyler Gellasch An unexpected fight is unfolding at one small agency in DC that may have profound impacts on every single American for decades. The battle is being waged on the 10th floor of 100 F Street (also known as the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission) and the Capitol building across… Read More »