banks

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Charlotte Hogg, Ex-Bank of England COO

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“However, I recognise that being sorry is not enough. We, as public servants, should not merely meet but exceed the standards we expect of others. Failure to do so risks undermining the public’s trust in us, something we cannot let happen. Furthermore, my integrity has, I believe, never been questioned throughout my career. I cannot allow that to change now. I am therefore resigning from my position. I will, of course, work with you through any transition.”

—-The Bank of England’s chief operating officer and incoming Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking, Charlotte Hogg, in her letter of resignation over criticism regarding a possible conflict of interest and her failure to report it.

Charlotte Hogg, a senior Bank of England official who had been named a deputy governor, resigned this week after a Parliament committee found that she had failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest: her brother held a senior position at Barclay’s during her time at the central bank. Hogg insisted that she never breached her duties or passed along any confidential information to her brother, but she had helped draft an industry ethics code of conduct policy required a disclosure of such conflicts. This creates doubts about her integrity, judgment competence, as well as the appearance of impropriety.

The Parliamentary committee recently issued a report finding that Ms. Hogg’s professional competence “short of the very high standards” required to be deputy governor, adding that her failure to disclose her brother’s role was a “serious error of judgment.”

This is one of my favorite kinds of conflicts, because it may be only appearances at stake. What if, as is often the case (sadly), Hogg and her brother are estranged? What if she doesn’t speak to him? What if they hate each other? Never mind: the public, not knowing this,  will suspect that she might use her position to favor him or his bank, so disclosure is crucial to maintaining public trust. Not disclosing, in contrast, raises suspicions. Why didn’t she let everyone know about her brother? What was she hiding? Continue reading →

The 8th Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2016: The Last Of The Worst

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

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Ethics Alarms wraps up the Worst in 2016 Ethics with the usual education and journalism breaches, Ethics Dunce of the Year, and more delights for the sadistic…

Unethical Government Fiasco Of The Year

The Flint, Michigan water crisis.  A failure of competence, diligence, responsibility and honesty, compounded by bureaucrats, elected officials, the city of Detroit, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the EPA made people sick and cost billions.

Good job, everybody!

Scam of the Year

Sen.Ted Cruz’s fake “official” mailer before the Iowa Caucus. Cruz’s campaign  sent out mailers labeled in all capital letters, “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.” On the other side, the mailer said, in red letters at the top, “VOTING VIOLATION.” The text read:

You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.

This is why Trump’s nickname for Cruz, “Lyin’ Ted,” was crude but accurate.

Ethics Dunces Of The Year

All the social media users and others who ended Facebook friendships, genuine friendships and relationship over the 2016 election. Haven’t they ever seen “It’s A Wonderful Life”? Morons. Shame on all of them.

Weenies of the Year

The college students who demanded that exams be cancelled, therapists be available, safe spaces be found, puppies be summoned and cry-ins be organized because the awful candidate they supported in the Presidential election lost, as candidates often do.

How embarrassing.

Unethical University Of The Year 

Liberty University.  This is the most competitive of categories, with all the schools that railroaded male students based on questionable sexual assault claims while quailing in fear of the Dept. of Education’s “Dear Colleague Letter,” and all the schools that signaled that the results of a simple election justified PTSD treatment for their shattered charges, as well as making it clear to any students who dared to tilt Republican that they were persona non grata. Nonetheless, Liberty University takes the prize with its unique combination of greed, hypocrisy, and warped values. From the Ethics Alarms post:

Last week, with great fanfare, Liberty hired Ian McCaw as its new athletic director. “My vision for Liberty is to position it as a pre-eminent Christian athletic program in America,” McCaw said during a news conference.

This is his first paying assignment since May, when he left his job as the athletic director at Baylor, also a Christian university. His departure was made essential after a thorough investigation that found that those overseeing Baylor’s  football team as well as the management of  the athletic department—that is, McCaw— had been informed of multiple gang rapes and sexual assault by team members and had ignored it, as any good football-loving Christian would….especially when a star was involved.

Continue reading →

From The “Rules Are Rules” Files: China’s “No Arms, No Loans” Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
Don't be afraid of Wu, you banks! He's completely armless!.

Don’t be afraid of Wu, you banks! He’s completely armless!.

Just when you are tempted to think the United States leads humanity in outrageous bureaucratic rigidity and the refusal to make sensible exceptions when common sense and decency demand it, a story like this one comes across the wires to restore one’s faith that cruelty and stupidity are universal.* That’s something to be thankful for…isn’t it?

Maybe not.

Wu Jianping, a 25-year-old teacher from Zhengzhou in the Henan province of China, told the news media there that banks have denied his application for a mortgage loan because he had inadequate identification.  Banks in China require fingerprints for loans, and Wu has no fingers. In fact, he has no arms, having lost both of them when he was electrocuted in an accident at the age of five.

Jianping says he typically writes his signature by holding a pen in his mouth, but banks rejected his loan applications on the grounds that his written signature can be easily imitated, presumably by anyone holding a pen in his mouth, and they don’t accept toeprints.

“Fingerprinting is a common practice because signatures can be imitated, but there is no way to copy a fingerprint,” one bank employee was quoted as saying. Ah. And just how does someone impersonate a loan applicant with no arms? How many 25 year-old teachers without arms are there in China, anyway? Are people always coming up to Wu Jianping in the streets of Beijing, where he works, and telling him, “I’m sorry! I mistook you for someone else” ?

The banks are receiving widespread criticism online and in social media, with many writing that demanding fingerprints from an armless man is unreasonable. Gee, ya think? Let’s have a panel discussion about it. Now some of the banks are apparently relenting. That’s generous of them.

I bet George Bailey would have given Wu a loan…

[Ethics Alarms will now open up the thread to all the terrible jokes anyone wants to submit, as my Thanksgiving gift to the readership. I might as well, since I know you will make them anyway. I reserve the one in the caption, one of my all-time favorites, and also “Well, they can’t accuse him of asking for a hand-out!”, because I wanted to write it first, and it’s my blog, so there. But there are a lot more. A lot.]

*One of the very first posts on Ethics Alarms highlighted a similar episode in an American bank. [Thanks to Tex for reminding me!]

_______________________

Pointer: Fark

 

Wells Fargo Ethics: The Unethical Demagoguery Of Elizabeth Warren

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

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Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), picks her adversaries so well that she gains popularity and unearned credibility through the power of cognitive dissonance. Listen closely, however, and you will hear the ranting of a class-biased demagogue.

Joining in on the bipartisan and well-deserved roasting of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf before the Senate Banking Committee hearing this week, Warren accused Stumpf of profiting from the mass scam in which over 5000 bank employees signed up customers for services they hadn’t requested, without their knowledge. The bank collected fees for these accounts, cards and services, and the employees got bonuses.

He probably did profit, since the bank did more business and his stock holdings increased in value. Was he aware of the scam, or even behind it? There is no evidence of that yet. Warren also said he should resign. She’s sure right about that. He is accountable as the CEO, and he failed his duty of oversight. It is, as Warren said, typical and wrong that all the firing so far have avoided the executive suites.

But Warren seems to be oddly unaware of her double standard regarding management and leadership accountability. The standards that she was railing at Stumpf for not meeting should also apply to Barack Obama’s accountability for a corrupt IRS, a rogue NSA, a drunk Secret Service, a politically-biased Justice Department, a horrifically incompetent Office of Personnel Management, a criminally negligent VA, and, of course, a technically-challenged State Department that was operated as cash-cow for its Secretary’s personal foundation.  Elizabeth Warren’s application of standards are driven by class bias and partisanship, not conduct or principle. She has enables an administration that has avoided assigning accountability or accepting it for multiple fiascos. The most recent? From Fox News:
Continue reading →

Someone Explain To Me, Please, Why Anyone Should Trust Wells Fargo With Their Money Ever Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Federal regulators announced today that  Wells Fargo employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without their customers requesting them or being informed, knowing since 2011.  Employees even created phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.The stealth accounts allowed the bank to charge millions in illicit fees,  while Wells Fargo employees boosted their sales figures and earned bonuses. Wells Fargo told CNNMoney that it had fired a staggering 5,300 employees over the last few years as they discovered the misconduct—but they didn’t tell customers what had been going on. .An investigation revealed that bank employees opened over 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts.

The scamster employees moved funds from customers’ legitimate accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. Then the victims were  charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees when  there wasn’t enough money in their original accounts. Wells Fargo hustlers also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers’ consent.

In response, the feds have hit Wells Fargo with the largest penalty since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began was founded in 201, ironically right around the timeWells Fargo started cheating its customer.. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.

I don’t care how much the bank pays, or even if I get some of it (The Marshalls banked there, but as soon as I get home, that’s going to end.) I don’t care of I have to keep the nest egg in an old sock. I’m not trusting these people. The managers are inept or corrupt, and the lower employees are poorly trained and supervised, as well as crooks. This is a bank. The management has high fiduciary duties. It breached all of them. Continue reading →

Your ATM Just Lied To Me. Not Cool, Wells Fargo

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments
Liar, Liar...Ok, you have no pants, but your tongue...no, wait,,,

Liar, Liar…Ok, you have no pants, but your tongue…no, wait…

I really mean lied, as in “deliberately communicated a falsehood in order to deceive.” There’s no excuse for it.This morning I had the pleasure of depositing a rather large check in my account, exactly the way I have been depositing smaller checks on a regular basis at the same ATM at the same branch office of the various iterations of what is now Wells Fargo. This was an institutional check, from another financial institution, so it was printed, boldly, and the amount was not scrawled, as with many personal checks I have occasion to deposit using the “no envelope” method we now have avaliable thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

Nonetheless, the machine this morning had the cheek to post a window and message I had never seen before, telling me that the machine “could not read the check amount” and asking me to enter it on the keypad, rather than just confirm the deposit.

What’s going on here?

Wells Fargo is lying, that’s what. The amount on the check, which I usually can barely make out from the small scanned image on the screen, was so dark and clear that I could read it easily from three feet away. If I could read it, the machine that made the image definitely could read it. No, this was a new security feature, like the time over Christmas that holds were placed on four of my credit cards while I was standing at a check-out register because my Christmas shopping bill was “unusual” according to some geniuses’ software programs. What that false message from the ATM really meant was, “Hold it there, a minute, buster. You don’t get checks this big; we think you’re a crook. So we’re going to rattle you with this pointless, annoying request, even though a crook is just as capable of entering the amount as a legitimate depositor.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: SunTrust Bank

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

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“SunTrust supports the rights of all Americans to fully exercise their freedoms granted under the Constitution, including those with respect to free speech and freedom of religion.”

—-SunTrust Bank, doing its best Cracker Barrel imitation by reversing its decision, announced  earlier in the day, to pull all of its listed properties with the Benham brothers’ bank-owned property business.

SunTrust was following the lead of craven, political correctness bully-enabling HGTV, which a week ago announced it was canceling a planned home renovation show hosted by the Benhams as punishment for their conservative views on same-sex marriage, because, as we all know, gays are the heart and soul of the home renovation business. Thus emboldened, the bank decided that citizens opposing same-sex marriage as taught by the faith they had been raised to embrace deserved to have their business harmed, since that’s what the SunTrust suits’ moistened fingers in the wind told them their sensitive, right-thinking customers wanted.

But the announcement turned that wind into a roaring hurricane of protest from conservatives, and, we can at least hope, some actual liberals among Democrats who comprehend that banks should not be enforcers of the growing, un-American movement to make life nasty, brutish and short for anyone who dares to see the world differently from the news media, the universities, and the rest of the thought-crime legislators among us. Thus the quick reversal, and the noble words above.

So why is SunTrust’s impeccable affirmation of their iron-clad support for our precious freedom unethical? Continue reading →

Be Careful What You Wish For Dept.: “Occupy” May Finally Have a Plan, and Sure Enough, It’s Ethically Bats

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh, yes,THIS is bound to work out well…

The core of my objection to Occupy Wall Street and its progeny was and is that it never had the discipline, cohesion or communications skills to make it clear what the “movement” really wanted to accomplish, other than generally blaming all the world’s ills on the wealthy and successful. This was the reason for its failure, though Occupy fans like to say that it “succeeded” by starting a national dialogue about corporate executive salaries and the growing disparity in income levels between the richest and the poorest Americans—as if that dialogue hadn’t been ongoing long  before the first sign went up in Zuccotti Park.

Now there are signs that the Occupy bitter-enders are hard at work launching a real, substantive effort with a specific goal, albeit and insane one: to bring down the financial system with a “debt strike.” ( In These Times headlined its story about this “You Are Not A Loan.” Pretty clever!) The idea is to refuse to pay back the interest or principal on outstanding debt, and to insist that all loans and interest  be forgiven, since the debt system is inherently corrupt and rigged to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

We shouldn’t have to expend a lot of argument on why this is unethical. People, companies and nations in serious debt reach that point because they spend more money than they have. They borrow money promising to repay, agreeing to pay an additional fee, interest, for the privilege of using money that doesn’t belong to them. The vast majority of debt is not amassed by desperate debtors who have to deal with the equivalent of Loan Shark Larry and risk broken legs or death unless they pay unconscionable fees. Most debt comes from wanting something before you can pay for it. While laws are in place to minimize predatory lending and to provide a safety net (in the form of bankruptcy) so people and companies don’t end up destitute and in debtor’s prison, essentially the system, like society itself, exists on trust, the cornerstone of all ethics.  Lenders give their money to trustworthy loan-seekers, and charge higher interest rates to those who they deem less trustworthy. That is fair. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Bank, the Addict, and the Broken Egg.”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The recent post about Ronald Page, the gambling addict given an open, no limits ATM privilege by Bank of America, with predictable results, suggests two opposite reactions. That’s why it was an Ethics Quiz. I expected my answer that it would be wrong to imprison Page for a crime committed because BOA’s negligence triggered his addictive behavior to be countered by the response Karl Penny expresses, persuasively, here. This is his Comment of the Day on “Ethics Quiz: The Bank, the Addict, and the Broken Egg.”

“Jack, I do volunteer work in prisons with people who have all sorts of substance abuse issues. In addition, I grew up in a family of alcoholics. I say that not to garner sympathy or whatever, but to establish credentials, however unofficial. Addicts know what they are doing, even while they are doing it, they know it. They know it when they are sober, and they know it when they’re drunk (alcoholics, gamblers, drug abusers, etc—they’re all drunks—not very PC, but brutally honest). They are human beings imbued with all that goes into being human and, as such, they command my compassion and concern. But. They know. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Bank, the Addict, and the Broken Egg

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

There was a little software problem when Bank of America acquired LaSalle Bank and the two were transferring account data. As a result, LaSalle depositor Ronald Page found that he could make unlimited ATM cash overdraft withdrawals, even though he had only $300 in his checking account.  This tempting state of affairs lasted for seventeen days, and then from December 1, 2008 to May 31, 2009, Page gambled like a man on fire.  Unfortunately for Page and Bank of America—but fortunately for several casinos—Page is a gambling addict. He withdrew, and gambled away, $1,543,104.00

Now the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit says he is seeking to send him to jail for 15 months  after he pleaded guilty to charges of theft of bank funds. He is also going to be required to pay back the money, with interest, guaranteeing poverty for life.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question:

Is this fair? Continue reading →