Wells Fargo CEO Throws Employees Under The Bus: “There Was No Incentive To Do Bad Things”

Earlier today we reported that as a result of the public (and market) outrage following news that Wells Fargo rewarded Carrie Tolstedt, the head of the group that was recently exposed as creating some 2 million fake credit card and bank accounts so it could churn late fees, and was in charge of what the bank’s employees called “sandbagging”, was leaving the bank with a $125 million package, this morning a panicked Wells Fargo said that it would eliminate all product sales goals in retail banking, starting next year.
That, however, was as far as CEO John Stumpf was willing to go. As the WSJ reported, the CEO of what until today was America’s largest bank by market cap, but is no more after a 4% drop in its stock price that sent JPM to the top position, spoke publicly Tuesday for the first time since the bank was slapped with a $185 million fine last week over its sales practices, defending the firm and the work he said it had already been doing to weed out bad behavior.
However, the one question everyone wanted answered – who did the buck stop with at Wells Fargo – remained unanswered as Stumpf “deftly” redirected. In his WSJ interview, Stumpf wouldn’t comment on who was ultimately responsible for the practices and sales-driven culture that led employees to open as many as two million accounts without customers’ knowledge. Mr. Stumpf said that at the bank, ‘There was no incentive to do bad things.”

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 13, 2016.