Wells Fargo. One of the most frustrating things about modern bank scandals is that they are not particularly good human dramas, lacking small casts of easily identifiable heroes and villains doing obviously heroic or villainous things. The Wells Fargo & Co. scandal, for instance, involved 5,300 mostly low-level bankers fired for creating fake accounts. They make bad villains: You couldn’t get all of them on a stage, or even remember all of their names, and their misdeeds are mitigated by the fact that they were making $12 an hour, afraid of losing their jobs, and faking accounts because they thought it was expected of them. Of course Wells Fargo also had a chief executive officer who made tens of millions of dollars while this was going on, and who eventually resigned over the fake accounts after being shouted at in Congress for a while, but he is not a wholly satisfying villain either. Like, he didn’t open any fake accounts. It seems unlikely that he ever told anyone to open any fake accounts; certainly there’s no evidence that he did. It doesn’t even seem like he had much reason to want the fake accounts, which after all were not profitable . He clearly missed some red flags — like employees telling the board about all the fake accounts! — but inactivity does not make for compelling drama. A villain whose villainy consists of sitting around while other people do bad things isn’t that scary. That’s " Seinfeld ," not "MacBeth." But it does kind of feel like someone at Wells Fargo has to have done something more dramatic, right? You wouldn’t expect 5,300 employees to stumble independently on the idea of making up fake accounts. And the fake accounts were especially concentrated in certain areas, like Southern California. So […]
