This is what Republicans are still intent on destroying:
Credit cards issued secretly without a customer’s consent. Bank employees creating fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services. Customers accumulating late fees on accounts they never even knew they had.
Those illegal banking practices were widespread and pervasive at Wells Fargo, which on Thursday was fined $185 million, including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest such penalty the agency has ever issued.
Federal banking regulators said the practices reflected serious flaws in the internal culture and oversight at Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest banks.
In all, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by their customers, the regulators said in a news conference.
Wells Fargo had to pay $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and $50 million to the City and County of Los Angeles.
They got caught, and fined, largely because of the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren and a key component of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. "Unchecked incentives can lead to serious consumer harm," said CFPB director Richard Cordray," and that is what happened here." Now there's a cop on that beat, much to the dismay of Republicans who have yet another new plan for destroying the CFPB.