“In Washington, when you are explaining, you are losing,” Mills wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.
Borrowing a page from Dimon and Blankfein, Wells Fargo mostly blamed rogue or lower-level employees for the misconduct. Chief Financial Officer John Shrewsberry said most of the workers involved weren’t seeking to generate revenue.
“It was really more at the lower end of the performance scale, where people apparently were making bad choices to hang on to their job,” he said at an investor conference Tuesday in New York.
‘Sales Practices’
But the OCC, in its consent order, said Wells Fargo’s community bank group -- led by Carrie Tolstedt, who reported directly to Stumpf -- "failed to adequately oversee sales practices and failed to adequately test and monitor branch employee sales practices." Tolstedt oversaw the unit until July.
Wells Fargo has taken unrelenting fire ever since the regulators announced the settlement Thursday. First, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said she called Stumpf to talk about "his willingness to take full responsibility."
Then, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton weighed in, using the scandal to praise the work of the CFPB, the consumer watchdog created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the regulatory overhaul intended to prevent another financial crisis.
Warren, Brown
By Monday night, Stumpf was being asked to testify in Washington after five U.S. senators including Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown wrote to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby calling for an investigation.
Lawmakers are likely to focus on "establishing a narrative that Wells Fargo is either too big to manage, or its management was willfully complicit in the fraud,” Isaac Boltansky, an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading LLC, wrote Tuesday in a note to clients. They’re also likely to want to make an issue of clawing back pay from executives who were responsible and may seek to request testimony from Tolstedt, Boltansky said.