Elizabeth Warren says it's time to tell banking CEOs: 'You are going to be held personally responsible' for fraud

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had plenty of harsh words for Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday morning, and she was still fired up hours later during an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show.

Warren took Stumpf to task regarding Wells Fargo's admission that employees created millions of fake accounts to meet sales goals. When Maddow asked Warren why she had decided to grill the CEO, Warren responded, "Why not? Here is a guy who says, 'I'm accountable,' and then his notion of accountability is he keeps his job, he keeps the millions of dollars in bonuses he made while this scam goes on, he keeps all the money from his stock improving because of this scam that's going on, and then blames the scam on more than 5,000 low-level employees and says, oh, he didn't know anything about it. There just comes a point when you say enough, you can't keep doing this."

Warren said the 2008 global economic crisis was caused by "giant financial institutions — not community banks, not credit unions, giant financial institutions — who figured out they could make buckets of money by cheating their own customers." The lead-up to the fiasco was "more elaborate," she added, but at its heart it was "about those mortgages, those subprime mortgages, that tricked people, that trapped people, that fooled people. It's eight years later, and Wall Street says, 'No, we've changed,' then it comes out that Wells Fargo, the biggest bank in the world, has been out there doing something called cross selling, and what it really means is they squeezed their employees so they made up checking accounts and credit card accounts." 


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The purpose of all this, Warren continued, is so executives can go to Wall Street and say, "'Our stock is worth more and more and more, because look at all these accounts we've got." There has to be a time when CEOs are told no, she said, "Not only 'no,' but 'You are going to be held personally responsible for this.' As long as these guys can get rich and waltz out the door, none of these things are going to change."