Elizabeth Warren nails it (again)

In the hearings today about Wells Fargo's fraud, she proves her fearlessness, mettle, and morality:





"During the hearing, senator after senator expressed astonishment that the creation of unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts by Wells Fargo employees could have gone on for so long without more assertive action by senior management. But Warren turned that line of questioning personal, suggesting the "cross-selling" strategy that prompted some employees to make the phony accounts enriched Stumpf's own stock portfolio.

"While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.75 million shares of Wells Fargo stock," Warren said. "The share price during this time went up by about $30, which comes out to more than $200 million in gains, all for you personally," Warren said.

Warren's plain-language questions, context-setting remarks and call for tough penalties show why she has become such a feared figure among Wall Street executives. "You should resign," Warren said at the end of a near-monologue about the broader failures of the banking system. "You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission."
...


In his responses, Stumpf was either frequently interrupted or forced into answers that had him repeating his talking points again and again. "Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?" Warren asked three times, before unleashing repeated questions about whether Stumpf had fired any senior executives.

"So you haven’t resigned," she said. "You haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings. You haven’t fired a single senior executive. Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don’t have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It's gutless leadership."

Warren continued to rip into Stumpf, casting the situation in moral terms and using her time behind the microphone to call for broader, harsher consequences for banking leaders. "The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds," she said. "We need tough new laws to hold corporate executives personally accountable. We need tough prosecutors who have the courage to go after the people at the top until then it will be business as usual."

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