“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members, and to the American public,” is what Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf plans to say to the Senate Banking Committee in his testimony, according to CNN. Then he will say that when Wells Fargo employees opened up two million fake accounts using their customers data, it wasn’t a “scheme” orchestrated by the company. The apology is aimed at not just the wronged customers, but the “American public because Wells Fargo is a prime example of the controversial “too big to fail” category of financial institutions whose safety net is ultimately American tax dollars — as proven by the last big financial crisis bailout.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has written an open letter to Wells Fargo explaining that she is “deeply disturbed” by Wells Fargo’s fraudulent activities, writing that there is “simply no place for this kind of outrageous behavior in America.” She adds that the “culture of misconduct and recklessness that preceded that crisis too often persists.” The fake accounts were allegedly created under managerial pressure for employees to perform, find new customers and expand services to existing customers. “It’s hard to imagine,” Clinton writes, “that top executives were unaware of a problem that involved thousands of the firm’s employees.”
