Wells Fargo acknowledged this month that its employees had, over the course of several years starting in 2011, opened as many as 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by customers. The company agreed to pay $185 million in penalties and fines to settle cases brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ..
.. “You haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, rebuked Mr. Stumpf, as she urged him to resign. “It’s gutless leadership.”
Mr. Stumpf repeatedly said any forfeited compensation was an issue for the board — of which he is the chairman — to take up. “Whatever the board accepts, whatever they do, I will accept and I will support,” he said
.. but he already held nearly 5.5 million shares of stock owned outright or vesting imminently as of March, when Wells Fargo filed an annual disclosure of his holdings.
Based on Tuesday’s closing share price of $45.09, those 5.5 million shares would be worth nearly $247 million.
The Extraordinary Intimacy Between the Ultra-Rich and Their Wealth Managers
For the one percent, a good advisor acts as a bookkeeper, a confidante, and, on occasion, a fishmonger.
.. While retaining legal counsel or consulting a financial adviser now commonly leads to short-term relationships, wealth managers maintain clients over the long term, sometimes amounting to lifetime employment.
.. It is not uncommon to find wealth managers working with the children or grandchildren of their original clients.
.. As one manager put it, the client has to “undress” in front of the wealth manager.
.. As a fiduciary, the wealth manager is bound to protect clients’ wealth from risk: This includes not just financial risk but the threat of spendthrift heirs dissipating the family assets or of family members with embarrassing secrets who might be targeted for blackmail.
.. one manager in Dubai described her client relationships in terms that emphasized the emotional labor and caring involved: “They’re asking you to take care of their family. You can’t just think of it as another piece of business … It’s not just a matter of signing documents; it’s the whole concept of doing the right thing for that family. You have to be able to say, ‘Mr. A., don’t worry—your kids are all going to be put through university. It’s all going to be okay.’ You have to be very businesslike. But also family-like.”
.. An English wealth manager based in Dubai explained that such outlandish requests are surprisingly common in the profession, in part as a way of testing whether the practitioner is “worthy” of the client making a long-term investment in the relationship:
.. And they don’t like change: they want to go to the same doctor all their lives, the same dentist, and the same lawyer or fiduciary.”
.. I said, “I’m your wealth manager, not your fishmonger.” And the client said, “Well, today you’re a fishmonger.”
.. Clients may also have a pragmatic reason for posing these tests: They allow the client to discover whether the wealth manager possesses the kind of social networks and influence necessary to provide extraordinary personal service.
.. a study of 19th-century British lawyers showed how their familiarity with clients’ business dealings allowed them to create whole new industries, such as the country’s railroad system; the professionals established a kind of private market, accessible only to the upper crust of British society.
.. Several specifically mentioned helping clients get treatment for their drug-addicted children—a particularly common problem in wealthy families.
Why did Hillary let four Americans die in Benghazi?
The compound in Benghazi wasn’t an embassy nor was it a consulate. It was a temporary diplomatic mission being considered for permanent status (in fact, Ambassador Stevens was there working on that very process).
Because it was neither a consulate nor an embassy, it did not have the same level of security as those types of facilities would have. They had requested additional security, but so had most diplomatic compounds in the region. The diplomatic security budget was maxed out, and the increase requested by the executive branch were not granted. There were no actionable leads prior to the attack, though the intelligence community had pointed out a general instability, and so no additional security budget was allocated. The State Department assumed, wrongly, that maintaining a low profile was the best way to protect the compound until it was granted permanent status.
Hillary Clinton’s Scandal Mistake
Clinton’s first experience with a criminal investigation came with Whitewater, the name given to various activities centered around a money-losing land deal that she and her husband invested in during the nineteen-eighties. Republican (and journalistic) claims of illegality in connection with the investment led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, in 1994. Fiske quickly cleared the Clintons of allegations of wrongdoing that had arisen in connection with an earlier investigation of Whitewater, as well as in the suicide of their friend and colleague Vincent Foster. Shortly after Fiske’s report, however, the court in charge of the case, under the independent-counsel law, replaced Fiske with Kenneth Starr, and Clinton’s true ordeal began.
Starr and his successors spent eight years, and more than seventy million dollars, on an investigation that began with the remains of the Whitewater probe and metastasized into an open-ended search-and-destroy mission into the personal and political lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
.. The lesson she took was that Republicans used criminal investigations as a political weapon against her.
.. That Clinton would even install such a rattletrap system suggests the influence of the Starr legacy.
.. Clinton’s visceral distaste for being the target of partisan smears led her to overreact, overdeny, and make a bad situation worse. As a victim of partisan vendettas, she couldn’t recognize a good-faith F.B.I. investigation when she saw one.