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It has begun. Wells Fargo has told all its customers that it is shuttering down ALL personal lines of credit. The bank has made it clear that it is shutting down ALL existing personal lines of credit and it will no longer offer such products. That includes revolving credit lines, which typically let users borrow $3,000 to $100,000. The bank used to sell these products as a way to consolidate higher-interest credit card debt or to pay for home renovations. This also included avoiding overdraft fees on linked checking accounts.

Customers have been given a 60-day notice that their accounts will be shut down. Wells Fargo has declined to comment when asked by Reuters. Previously, Wells Fargo suspended home equity loans, claiming it was due to the economic uncertainty with COVID. Wells Fargo has been struggling with a tarnished reputation following a series of consumer financial scandals. In 2016, the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal led to the resignation of CEO John Stumpf and resulted in fines of $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Despite the fact that Wells Fargo Bank likes to portray it was formed on March 18, 1852, the truth is that it was simply a freight company back then. It was in New York City where Henry Wells and William G. Fargo joined with several other investors to launch their idea of a freight company to cover the trade between the East and West Coasts. What sparked the idea was the discovery of gold in California in 1849. They recognized that there would be a demand for cross-country shipping. Wells Fargo & Company was formed to take advantage of this great opportunity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wells Unexpectedly Shuts All Existing Personal Lines Of Credit, Hinting US Economy On The Edge

July 8, 2021

Wells Unexpectedly Shuts All Existing Personal Lines Of Credit, Hinting US Economy On The Edge

Wells Fargo just announced that it’s shutting down all of its existing personal lines of credit – a popular product offered by the retail-focused Wall Street giant – a move that will likely infuriate legions of customers.

The revolving credit lines, which will be shut down in the coming weeks, typically allow users borrow $3K to $100K, were pitched as a way to consolidate higher-interest credit-card debt, pay for home renovations or avoid overdraft fees on checking accounts attached to the loan.

Customers have been given a 60-day notice that their accounts will be shuttered, and remaining balances will require regular minimum payments, according to the statement.

According to CNBC, it’s the latest “difficult decision” facing Wells CEO Charlie Scharf, who is being forced to make cutbacks to the banks’ business thanks to restrictions imposed by the Federal Reserve years ago as punishment for the bank’s criminal scandals like the now-infamous scandal whereby branch managers opened credit lines for customers without permission. a scandal that outraged the public.

“Wells Fargo recently reviewed its product offerings and decided to discontinue offering new Personal and Portfolio line of credit accounts and close all existing accounts,” the bank said in the six-page letter. The move would let the bank focus on credit cards and personal loans, it said.

The sudden closures will leave many customers without what may be a critical source of liquidity. What’s worse, many will be penalized for the decision, making it more difficult for them to receive credit from a new source. Per CNBC, those whose credit lines are involuntarily closed will still see their FICO scores penalized as if they had elected to close the credit line willingly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No Banker Goes To Jail – Former Barclays Executives Acquitted Of Fraud

February 29, 2020

No Banker Goes To Jail – Former Barclays Executives Acquitted Of Fraud

Days after Wells Fargo agreed to pay $35 million to settle regulatory claims that its financial advisors pushed clients into risky exchange-traded funds, three former Barclays executives were acquitted of fraud by a London jury after they were accused of paying secret “fees” to Qatar in return for emergency funding during the financial crisis, reported Reuters.

In exchange for rescue financing to avoid nationalization of the bank (which would’ve meant shareholders take deep losses and executives loses their bonuses), Roger Jenkins, Tom Kalaris and Richard Boath (the three former Barclays executives) paid £322 million ($423 million) in “fees” to the Qatari sheikh who arranged the financing. To ensure that the deal went through, the executives allegedly conspired to hide these payments from their investors, the British government, and the press.

We noted several weeks before the first trial began last January, that after more than a decade since the fall of Lehman Brothers, ushering in the financial crisis, and wrecking the finances of tens of millions of middle-class Americans and citizens of other Western nations, “no bank executives have faced criminal penalties – that is, until very recently.”

The three former executives were on the cusp of facing a maximum of 10 years in jail after a 7.5-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) that charged the three in 2017, alleging they paid a “fee” demanded by Qatar in exchange for investing £4 billion ($5.15 billion) in the bank as part of an £11 billion ($14.15 billion) emergency fundraising in 2008. The funding allowed Barclays to avoid nationalization that would’ve been devastating for shareholder value.

The acquittals of the three executives is another loss for SFO, which failed to win a separate 2018 trial against Barclays for unlawful financial assistance to Qatar in 2008.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Much Are Banks Exposed to Subprime? More than we Think

April 15, 2018

How Much Are Banks Exposed to Subprime? More than we Think

Wells Fargo has $81 billion in exposure to loans that, on paper, it isn’t exposed to.

A couple of days ago, when I wrote about the soaring delinquency rates in subprime auto loans – the worst since 1996 – and the collapse of three specialized small subprime lenders, I stumbled over a special nugget.

One of the collapsed small lenders, Summit Financial Corp, when it filed for bankruptcy on March 23, disclosed that it owed Bank of America $77 million. This loan was secured by the auto loans Summit had extended to subprime customers, who’re now defaulting in large numbers. In the bankruptcy documents, BofA alleged that Summit had repossessed many of these cars without writing down the bad loans, thus under-reporting the losses and misrepresenting the value of the collateral (the loans). This allowed Summit to borrow more from BofA to fund more subprime loans, BofA said.

Summit is just a tiny lender and doesn’t really matter. But there are a whole slew of these nonbank lenders, specializing in auto loans, revolving consumer loans, payday loans, and mortgages. Some of these nonbank lenders specialize in “deep subprime.” And some of these lenders are fairly large.

Since the Financial Crisis, big banks have mostly avoided subprime lending. Instead, they’re lending to the companies that then provide financing to subprime customers. And BofA is finding out just how much risk it was taking with its loan to Summit that was secured by now defaulting auto loans that were secured by cars that, once repossessed, are worth only a fraction of the loan value when they’re sold at auction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s How Regulators Are Inadvertently Laying The Groundwork For The Next Housing Crisis

February 24, 2018

Here’s How Regulators Are Inadvertently Laying The Groundwork For The Next Housing Crisis

Only a few weeks ago, we pointed out a remarkable development in the US mortgage market that has significant implications not only for mortgage borrowers, but perhaps the broader economy as a whole: Wells Fargo, formerly America’s foremost mortgage lender, had seen its share of the market eclipsed by Quicken Loans – the Detroit-based, nonbank lending behemoth that pioneered applying for mortgages on the Internet with its now-famous Rocket Mortgage (readers will remember RM’s celebrity-packed SuperBowl spot).

Many factors (aside from Wells’ own criminality, which recently drew a strong, but ultimately meaningless, rebuke from the Fed) have contributed to this shift, as Bloomberg points out.

But as it turns out, the rising dominance of nonbank lenders like Quicken could portend a massive, bad-debt fueled binge reminiscent of the circumstances that led up to the housing crisis. That is to say, a wave of bad debt could create a cascading wave of defaults with repercussions far beyond the housing market.

Considering all the restrictions that Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis regulations slapped on mortgage lenders, one might wonder how this might be possible.

Of course, as Bloomberg explains, instead of making the market safer, regulators are inadvertently enabling the rise of lenders like Quicken who aren’t bound by many of the rules that restrict banks’ mortgage-lending practices. As a result, Quicken Loans is effectively free from many of the regulations that have forced some of the biggest mortgage lenders into a period of retrenchment…

Make no mistake, regulators have done plenty to rein in the mortgage business since the 2000s. New rules require that lenders carefully assess borrowers’ ability to pay, and that mortgage servicers — which process payments and manage other relations with borrowers — give troubled customers plenty of opportunity to renegotiate their debts before resorting to foreclosure.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wells Fargo: Who Says Crime Doesn’t Pay

September 18, 2016

Wells Fargo: Who Says Crime Doesn’t Pay

Unless you’re one of the few people still watching CNN™, you may have missed what can only be one of the most scandalous in-house criminal activities to be uncovered at a bank. And not just any bank. It happened at none other than Wells Fargo™, which, up until the scandal was revealed, was the number one bank (as measured via its market cap) in the U.S. The scandal? Here are just a few highlights as reported. To wit:

“On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts — without their customers knowing it — since 2011.
The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money.
“Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.”

And to use CNN’s own words to describe it: “The scope of the scandal is shocking.”

How shocking you may ask? Fair enough, here’s a little more from their reporting…

“The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers’ existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as “widespread.” Customers were being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees — because there wasn’t enough money in their original accounts.
Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers’ knowledge or consent. Roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred over $400,000 in fees, including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees.”

As scandalous as all the above is, what is far more insidious, is the damage it inflicts (once again) upon the very fabric of free market capitalism, trust in laws, and last but not least: trust and belief in actual contrition. i.e., “No we’ve really changed, really!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States

September 17, 2016

Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States

Do you remember when our politicians promised to do something about the “too big to fail” banks? Well, they didn’t, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. On Thursday, it was announced that one of those “too big to fail” banks, Wells Fargo, has been slapped with 185 million dollars in penalties. It turns out that for years their employees had been opening millions of bank and credit card accounts for customers without even telling them. The goal was to meet sales goals, and customers were hit by surprise fees that they never intended to pay. Some employees actually created false email addresses and false PIN numbers to sign customers up for accounts. It was fraud on a scale that is hard to imagine, and now Wells Fargo finds itself embroiled in a major crisis.

There are six banks in America that basically dwarf all of the other banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. If a single one of those banks were to fail, it would be a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for our financial system. So we need these banks to be healthy and running well. That is why what we just learned about Wells Fargois so concerning…

Employees of Wells Fargo (WFC) boosted sales figures by covertly opening the accounts and funding them by transferring money from customers’ authorized accounts without permission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Los Angeles city officials said.

An analysis by the San Francisco-headquartered bank found that its employees opened more than two million deposit and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers, the officials said. Many of the transfers ran up fees or other charges for the customers, even as they helped employees make incentive goals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States

September 10, 2016

Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States

Employees of Wells Fargo (WFC) boosted sales figures by covertly opening the accounts and funding them by transferring money from customers’ authorized accounts without permission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Los Angeles city officials said.

An analysis by the San Francisco-headquartered bank found that its employees opened more than two million deposit and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers, the officials said. Many of the transfers ran up fees or other charges for the customers, even as they helped employees make incentive goals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Federal Regulators Accuse Banks Of Not Having Credible Crisis Plans, Would Need Another Bailout

April 13, 2016

Federal Regulators Accuse Banks Of Not Having Credible Crisis Plans, Would Need Another Bailout

Perhaps the biggest farce to result from the Dodd-Frank legislation designed to “rein in” banks was the ridiculous notion of “living wills” – a concept that makes zero sense in an environment where the failure of even one bank assures a systemic crisis and could – as the Lehman financial crisis showed – lead to the collapse of all other interlinked financial institutions.

Which is why we were not surprised to read this morning that federal regulators announced that five out of eight of the biggest U.S. banks do not have credible plans for winding down operations during a crisis without the help of public money.

Which is precisely the point: now that the precedent has been set and banks know they can rely on the generosity of taxpayers (with the blessing of legislators) why should they even bother planning; they know very well that if just one bank fails, all would face collapse, and the only recourse would be trillions more in taxpayer aid.

As Reuters writes, the “living wills” that the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation jointly agreed were not credible came from Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, J.P. Morgan Chase, State Street, Wells Fargo. What is more impressive is that the Fed and FDIC found any living will to be credible.

Also amusing: it was only the FDIC which alone determined that the plan submitted by Goldman Sachs was not credible while the Goldman-dominated Fed gave its blessing; alternatively, the Federal Reserve Board on its own found that the plan of Morgan Stanley – Goldman’s arch rival in investment banking – not credible. Citigroup’s living will did pass, but the regulators noted it had “shortcomings.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Was There A Run On The Bank? JPM Caps Some ATM Withdrawals

April 4, 2016

Was There A Run On The Bank? JPM Caps Some ATM Withdrawals

Under the auspices of “protecting clients from criminal activity,” JPMorgan Chase has decided to impose capital controls on . As WSJ reports, following the bank’s ATM modification to enable $100-bills to be dispensed with no limit, some customers started pulling out tens of thousands of dollars at a time. This apparent bank run has prompted Jamie Dimon to cap ATM withdrawals at $1,000 per card daily for non-customers.

Most large U.S. banks, including Chase, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. have been rolling out new ATMs, sometimes known as eATMs, which perform more services akin to tellers. That includes allowing customers to withdraw different dollar denominations than the usual $20, typically ranging from $1 to $100.

The efforts run counter to recent calls to phase out large bills such as the $100 bill or the €500 note ($569) to discourage corruption while putting up hurdles for tax evaders, terrorists, drug dealers and human traffickers.

The Wall Street Journal reported in February that the European Central Bank was considering eliminating its highest paper currency denomination, the €500 note. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers also has called for an agreement by monetary authorities to stop issuing notes worth more than $50 or $100.

This move appears to have backfired and created a ‘run’ of sorts on Chase…

A funny thing happened as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. modified its ATMs to dispense hundred-dollar bills with no limit: Some customers started pulling out tens of thousands of dollars at a time.

While it was changing to newer ATM technology, J.P. Morgan found that some customers of banks in countries such as Russia and Ukraine had used Chase ATMs to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars in a single day, people familiar with the situation said. Chase had instances of people withdrawing $20,000 in one transaction, they added.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

JPMorgan Just Sounded a $500 Million Alarm Bell On America’s Dying Oil Patch

February 23, 2016

JPMorgan Just Sounded a $500 Million Alarm Bell On America’s Dying Oil Patch

Back on January 14, we noted that JPMorgan did something they haven’t done in 22 quarters: the bank increased its loan loss provisions.

The “reserve build of ~$100mm [is] driven by $60mm in Oil & Gas and $26mm in Metals & Mining within the commercial banking group,” the bank said.

That led us to ask of JPMorgan the same thing we’ve asked of Wells Fargo, BofA, and every other TBTF that’s gotten itself overextended in America’s soon-to-be bankrupt O&G space: “if a regional bank like BOK Financial was slammed by just one loan (to what we can only assume was a smaller energy firm), where does the buck stop, and how many other regional, or even big, banks, are woefully underreserved in their exposure to energy loans?”

Most importantly, we said, are these follow up questions:

“How long before the impairments and charges currently targeting smaller firms finally shift to the bigger ones? And how underreserved is JPM for that eventuality?”

Today, just over a month later, we got the answer ahead of JPM’s investor day, when JPMorgan said it will increase its reserves for oil and gas loans by 60% in Q1.

As you can see from the following slide, provisions will rise by $500 million from $815 million the bank had set aside as of the end of last year. Metals and mining reserves will also rise, by $100 million.

Note also that the bank says it may be forced to provision another $1.5 billion should crude prices stay at or near $25 for an extended period of time.

As is apparent from the chart, Dimon’s “fortress” balance sheet includes some $19 billion in HY O&G exposure. We’re anxious to see if the vaunted billionaire will dismiss the enormous writedowns that are invariably coming in the next few quarters as a “tempest in a teapot.”

We also wonder which bulge bracket bank will be the next to admit that it’s woefully underreserved for 2016’s inevitable crude carnage.

A Glimpse Of Things To Come: Bankrupt Shale Producers “Can’t Give Their Assets Away”

January 20, 2016

A Glimpse Of Things To Come: Bankrupt Shale Producers “Can’t Give Their Assets Away”

Over the course of the last several weeks, we’ve spent quite a bit of time sounding the alarm bells on America’s growing list of bankrupt oil and gas drillers.

We’ve also been keen to point out that the long list of cash flow negative US producers has only managed to stay in business this long because Wall Street has thus far been willing to plug the sector’s funding gap with cheap financing thanks to ZIRP and investors’ insatiable demand for anything that looks like it might offer some semblance of yield.

It is not a matter of “if” but rather a matter of “when” the entire complex goes under and when that happens, the relatively paltry sums banks have set aside against losses in their energy books will balloon as everyone on Wall Street simultaneously pulls a BOK Financial.

Indeed, we’re already hearing the not-so-distant rumblings of this oncoming default freight train as JP Morgan raises its net loan loss reserves for the first time in 22 quarters, Wells Fargo discloses $17 billion in “mostly” junk energy exposure, and Citi dodges questions about the reserves it’s holding against a $58 billion energy book that the bank may or may not be marking to market depending on what the Dallas Fed “didn’t” tell banksearlier this month.

M2M or no, higher provisions or not, the end of America’s oil “miracle” is coming and there’s nothing Wall Street can do to stop it. At this point in the game, no one is going to finance these companies’ cash flow deficits and the fundamentals in the oil market are laughably bad. Storage is overflowing, demand is withering, and supply is, well, “drowning” us all, to quote the IEA.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Exclusive: Dallas Fed Quietly Suspends Energy Mark-To-Market On Default Contagion Fears

January 16, 2016

Exclusive: Dallas Fed Quietly Suspends Energy Mark-To-Market On Default Contagion Fears

Earlier this week, before first JPM and then Wells Fargo revealed that not all is well when it comes to bank energy loan exposure, a small Tulsa-based lender, BOK Financial, said that its fourth-quarter earnings would miss analysts’ expectations because its loan-loss provisions would be higher than expected as a result of a single unidentified energy-industry borrower. This is what the bank said:

“A single borrower reported steeper than expected production declines and higher lease operating expenses, leading to an impairment on the loan. In addition, as we noted at the start of the commodities downturn in late 2014, we expected credit migration in the energy portfolio throughout the cycle and an increased risk of loss if commodity prices did not recover to a normalized level within one year. As we are now into the second year of the downturn, during the fourth quarter we continued to see credit grade migration and increased impairment in our energy portfolio. The combination of factors necessitated a higher level of provision expense.”

Another bank, this time the far larger Regions Financial, said its fourth-quarter charge-offs jumped $18 million from the prior quarter to $78 million, largely because of problems with a single unspecified energy borrower. More than one-quarter of Regions’ energy loans were classified as “criticized” at the end of the fourth quarter.

It didn’t stop there and and as the WSJ added, “It’s starting to spread” according to William Demchak, chief executive of PNC Financial Services Group Inc. on a conference call after the bank’s earnings were announced. Credit issues from low energy prices are affecting “anybody who was in the game as the oil boom started,” he said. PNC said charge-offs rose in the fourth quarter from the prior quarter but didn’t specify whether that was due to issues in its relatively small $2.6 billion oil-and-gas portfolio.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trapped Inside The Zero-Bound: Crossing The Economic “Event Horizon”

January 14, 2016

Trapped Inside The Zero-Bound: Crossing The Economic “Event Horizon”

A friend of mine, a very successful tech CEO who is also profoundly astute in matters of finance, once asked his economics prof during a lecture on interest rates in his university days “could interest rates ever go negative?”.

The professor, gazing over his glasses and down his nose at what obviously had to be an imbecile in his lecture hall calmly set aside a second of his podium time to shoot the idea down: “No.”, he said quite simply, as if he couldn’t believe he had to be explaining this to university level students, “it has to be a positive number….”.

My colleague believed him. After all, being in technology he was familiar with the computer code analogy of a negative interest rate, that being the dreaded divide by zero error. Coders take great pains to avoid these because if it actually happens, the currently running program basically “shits the bed” and all bets are off.

If the currently running program was generating a balance sheet, it may set the line printer on fire instead. If it’s deploying an airplane’s landing gear it may jettison everything in the cargo bay. It’s impossible to guess what will happen. So when people who viscerally understand the kind of consequences the ERR:DIV0 can cause extrapolate it out to an entire economy, they’re the ones that end up “shitting the bed”. It’s really bad.

I always knew that ZIRP was bad, but I just thought it would be normal, run-of-the-mill bad. You know, where most normal people get screwed for a long time, and then “suddenly” everything comes unglued and the financial system implodes, followed by a government intervention while the usual suspects (free markets and capitalism) get hung from telephone poles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Credit Crunch Is Back: Banks Scramble To Collateralize Loans To Record Levels

December 27, 2015

The Credit Crunch Is Back: Banks Scramble To Collateralize Loans To Record Levels

One of the biggest quandaries of this cycle for the US economy has been the amount and growth of commercial bank loans. Virtually non-existent for the first three years of the centrally-planned new normal, something changed in 2012 at which point US bank loans, led by Commercial and Industrial or C&I lending growing at a double-digit pop, started to rise at an impressive pace, asking many to wonder: maybe the biggest driver for a sustainable economic recovery is in fact present, because where there is loan demand, there is velocity of money.

A few years later, as the loan growth persisted with virtually no flow through to GDP growth, we – and others – wondered: we know there is a “source of funds”, but what about the “use of funds” – how can banks be creating tens of billions in loans if virtually nothing was ending up in the broader economy?

The first flashing red flag appeared last July, when we reported that companies were using secured bank debt to repurchase stock: a stunning, foolhardy development, comparable to taking out a mortgage on one’s house and using the proceeds to buy deep out of the money calls on the S&P 500. This is what the FT said at the time:

For the top 25 US commercial banks by assets, C & I lending grew by 10.5 per cent in the quarter to June 25 from the previous quarter, according to annualised weekly data from the Federal Reserve.

This type of lending is an important source of business for the largest US banks, representing about a fifth of all loans made by the likes of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, according to Citigroup research. While low interest rates have made business lending less lucrative, the relationships it forges open doors for the banks to sell other services such as treasury management, hedging and leasing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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