Wells Fargo

As TWI has reported, Wells Fargo & Co. teamed up with talk show host and commentator Tavis Smiley for “Wealth Building” seminars in black neighborhoods beginning in 2005. A suit by the Illinois attorney general contends Wells used the seminars to market high-cost and risky subprime loans to minority borrowers.
Smiley declined any comment for our [...]

Now that commentator and PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley has severed his ties to Wells Fargo & Co., what about the bank itself? As Smiley noted in his decision to cut business ties with Wells, the bank is facing several lawsuits charging that it engaged in illegal discriminatory lending practices by allegedly selling high-cost [...]

The PBS star attracted crowds to what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth, but a lawsuit alleges it was actually just the opposite.

Well, at least one banking executive is personally feeling the pain of the foreclosure crisis: Wells Fargo has fired a top employee who moved into a foreclosed Malibu beach house and threw lavish parties all summer there, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules [...]

Just when you thought it was a tough time to be a banker comes this heartwarming tale of a bank executive effectively squatting in a $12 million Malibu foreclosure. From The Associated Press:
A Wells Fargo executive who oversees foreclosed properties hosted parties and spent long summer weekends in a $12 million Malibu beach house, moving [...]

As lawsuits wind their way through the court system, more details and allegations about the inner workings of the subprime world are emerging.

As a quick addition to Mary’s thoughts on yesterday’s Treasury Department report confirming the reluctance of mortgage servicers to modify loans through the administration’s Making Home Affordable program, it’s worth noting that some of the poorest-performing banks are the same institutions that appeared before Congress just a few weeks ago with declarations that they were [...]

For neighborhoods fighting the blight and deteriorating property values caused by foreclosed properties that banks abandon or unload on speculators, this is big news: A housing court judge in Cleveland has ordered Wells Fargo to clean up the foreclosed houses it owns in Cleveland.
In the preliminary injunction he issued Thursday, Judge Raymond Pianka also required [...]

An analysis of Federal Election Committee filings by The Washington Independent shows a steep drop-off in financial industry giving.

Wells Fargo announced today it expects to turn a $3 billion profit for the first quarter of this year, some surprisingly good news from the troubled banking sector, CNNMoney reports.
Those results exceed expectations from analysts, and they sparked a stock market rally early today.