Wells Fargo’s ‘Living Will’ Plan Is Rejected Again by Regulators

Re:Wells Fargo’s ‘Living Will’ Plan Is Rejected Again by Reg... by a_c_s on Thursday December 15, 2016 @03:10PM (#13187839)

$0.190 billion is a trivial amount for Wells Fargo: it amounts to 3.4% of their Q3 2016 profits. They made $5.6 Billion dollars last quarter on $22.3 Billion in revenue. [1]

If an individual commits one count of Social Security fraud they would pay a fine of $10,000 or about 20% of the median household income. [2] (This is an arbitrarily picked form of financial fraud)

If the bank had a proportional punishment they would pay 20% of their annual revenue for systemic fraud, which would be roughly $18 billion dollars.

[1] https://www.wellsfargo.com/about/investor-relations/investme... [2] https://www.reference.com/government-politics/penalties-comm...

edit: used quarterly instead of annual figure for calculation

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Re:Wells Fargo’s ‘Living Will’ Plan Is Rejected Again by Reg... by pg314 on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:16PM (#13189049)

Yes, the fine is quite small for WFC and a fine of 18 billion dollars definitely would get their attention. It's still something WFC could survive (it's about a year's worth of profits), and totally different from putting WFC into bankruptcy.

I'm not convinced you can compare personal law and corporate law. The fact that it's a fixed fine in personal law, regardless of income/wealth doesn't seem fair. Also, if you want to extend the analogy maybe it would be more appropriate to take 20% of profits? 20% of revenue it much easier for Apple to stomach than Walmart, because of higher margins. But then what do you do with companies that don't make a profit...

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