From Al Lewis Of The Wall Street JournalCommentary: Activists try to put the cuffs on Wells Fargo chief
DENVER (MarketWatch) — Melvin Willis, a 22-year-old activist from Richmond, Calif., attempted something Tuesday that not even the U.S. attorney general dares to do: Place the CEO of a giant bank under arrest.
“Too-big-to-jail is an outrage,” Willis told me in a telephone interview after the attempt.
Willis had just interrupted the annual shareholders meeting of Wells Fargo in Salt Lake City where he told CEO John Stumpf that he was under citizen’s arrest.
In the realm of high finance, such vigilante justice never gets far. Private security guards surrounded Willis and members of his posse. They were escorted from the Grand America Hotel before they could even read off the charges.
Willis is a part-time staffer at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. The group drove more than 700 miles from the San Francisco Bay area to demonstrate against Wells Fargo, as they have so many times in the past. Offenses in their “citizen’s arrest warrant” included illegal foreclosures and unlawful discrimination against black and Hispanic mortgage applicants.
Last year, Wells Fargo agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle civil complaints containing these same allegations. But the bank denied guilt, and not one executive was named as a defendant.
After the financial crisis hit in 2008, Wells Fargo received $25 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It has since repaid this taxpayer bailout, but it can’t shake its branding as a too-big-to-fail bank, an institution too critical to the financial system to ever be shut down or prosecuted.
“The only thing John Stumpf has is a lot of money,” Willis said. “Otherwise, he’s just a person like any of us. If we did what he did ... we would all be locked up.”
Last month, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed what activists like Willis have been saying.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he said “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”
Since that remark, activist groups have been flooding Washington with petition signatures demanding justice. A petition by MoveOn.org demands “immediate steps to break up the big banks and prosecute the criminals who used them to destroy our economy.”
Meantime, a debate rages in Congress over whether new regulations and capital requirements have really ended too-big-to-fail.
DENVER (MarketWatch) — Melvin Willis, a 22-year-old activist from Richmond, Calif., attempted something Tuesday that not even the U.S. attorney general dares to do: Place the CEO of a giant bank under arrest.
“Too-big-to-jail is an outrage,” Willis told me in a telephone interview after the attempt.
Willis had just interrupted the annual shareholders meeting of Wells Fargo in Salt Lake City where he told CEO John Stumpf that he was under citizen’s arrest.
In the realm of high finance, such vigilante justice never gets far. Private security guards surrounded Willis and members of his posse. They were escorted from the Grand America Hotel before they could even read off the charges.
Willis is a part-time staffer at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. The group drove more than 700 miles from the San Francisco Bay area to demonstrate against Wells Fargo, as they have so many times in the past. Offenses in their “citizen’s arrest warrant” included illegal foreclosures and unlawful discrimination against black and Hispanic mortgage applicants.
Last year, Wells Fargo agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle civil complaints containing these same allegations. But the bank denied guilt, and not one executive was named as a defendant.
After the financial crisis hit in 2008, Wells Fargo received $25 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It has since repaid this taxpayer bailout, but it can’t shake its branding as a too-big-to-fail bank, an institution too critical to the financial system to ever be shut down or prosecuted.
“The only thing John Stumpf has is a lot of money,” Willis said. “Otherwise, he’s just a person like any of us. If we did what he did ... we would all be locked up.”
Last month, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed what activists like Willis have been saying.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he said “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”
Since that remark, activist groups have been flooding Washington with petition signatures demanding justice. A petition by MoveOn.org demands “immediate steps to break up the big banks and prosecute the criminals who used them to destroy our economy.”
Meantime, a debate rages in Congress over whether new regulations and capital requirements have really ended too-big-to-fail.