|
|
|
|
|
The Morning Risk Report: Champagne Toasts, Big Ambitions: Wells Fargo CEO Embraces Newfound Freedom
|
|
By David Smagalla | Dow Jones Risk Journal
|
|
|
|
|
Good morning. Champagne flowed outside of the high-rise corner office of Wells Fargo Chief Executive Charlie Scharf on Tuesday after regulators lifted a yearslong penalty that restricted the bank’s growth.
|
|
-
Cause for celebration: Things are about to change at Wells Fargo, the fourth-largest U.S. bank, without the Federal Reserve’s restriction that capped its assets at $2 trillion, a punishment for a scandal involving the creation of millions of fake customer accounts. Scharf, 60 years old, will lead the bank into its next era, with the newfound ability to grow its balance sheet and redirect resources that had been tied up in regulatory work for the better part of the last decade.
-
Impact: The bank hopes some of that action will be on Wall Street, where it has a smaller presence because of its historic focus on plain-vanilla Main Street businesses. There is a path for Wells Fargo to become one of the country’s top five investment banks, Scharf said, “and then there’ll be an argument about, ‘Well, why top five? Why not four or three?’”
-
Responses: But not all are pleased with the move. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Maxine Waters, prominent Democrats who sit on influential congressional finance committees, on Wednesday called on the Federal Reserve to walk back the decision it made this week to lift the sweeping growth restriction it placed on Wells Fargo.
|
|
|
Content from our sponsor: Deloitte
|
|
How Double Materiality Can Help Drive Business Strategy, Innovation
|
An emerging framework for measuring materiality may offer important insights for how enterprises can broaden their approach to creating value and building resilience. Read More
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Justice Department is instructing prosecutors to give priority to victim compensation when calculating penalties in settlements involving U.S. and foreign regulators. PHOTO: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
|
|
|
|
Corporate prosecutors instructed to prioritize victim compensation.
The Justice Department is telling criminal division prosecutors that in most cases they should stop crediting penalties that companies pay to other U.S. civil authorities and instead pour more of the money into victim compensation efforts.
In a June 5 internal memo seen by Risk Journal, criminal division chief Matt Galeotti told prosecutors to “prioritize” victim compensation when calculating penalties in settlements involving U.S. and foreign regulators. Often in such coordinated resolutions, the Justice Department credits a portion of the payouts a company makes to the other agencies involved.
|
|
|
Supreme Court makes it easier to pursue reverse discrimination claims.
The Supreme Court made it easier for workers to sue for reverse discrimination in a unanimous ruling that allowed a woman to pursue a claim that she was denied a job promotion because she is straight.
What was the issue? The decision on Thursday revives a lawsuit brought by Marlean Ames, who alleged the Ohio state agency where she works denied her a promotion, and then demoted her, because she is heterosexual. She said that both her old job and the one she had sought were given to gay people. Her supervisor at the time was also gay.
|
|
|
-
UBS’ decision to fire a financial advisor will cost the Swiss bank $1 million, according to Barron’s.
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission declined to take action against Inotiv following an investigation into whether the drug testing company violated foreign bribery law with how it sourced monkeys.
-
Boeing will pay $1.1 billion to avoid prosecution for two crashes of its 737 MAX jets.
-
The Senate confirmed Michelle Bowman on Wednesday as the Federal Reserve’s next vice chair for banking supervision, reports Barron's.
-
UniCredit said the European Union wouldn’t launch an in-depth investigation into its $10 billion-plus bid for Banco BPM, effectively clearing the deal to take over its smaller rival.
-
A legal analysis by law firm Dentons warns Ukrainian sanctions may apply extraterritorially to any transactions involving sanctioned persons, even those executed entirely outside Ukraine.
-
American Airlines highlighted its focus on “ambitious climate goals” in a report last year. In a similar filing a few weeks ago, that phrase was gone.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gleb Yushin, born in the Soviet Union, got his Ph.D. in the U.S., where he co-founded Sila Nanotechnologies. Photo: Jason Henry for WSJ
|
|
|
|
Trump’s crackdown on foreign students threatens to disrupt pipeline of inventors.
Ajay Bhatt had never been on a plane when he left India for City University of New York to pursue a graduate degree in 1981. More than four decades and 130 patents later, billions of people are still using Bhatt’s most-recognizable invention, the Universal Serial Bus, or USB.
“My dad really didn’t want me to go,” Bhatt recalls. But, he said, “This was the country where you could get the very best education, and everybody was welcoming.”
High-skilled immigration has long been part of the secret sauce that gave the U.S. the world’s most dynamic economy. Studies show newcomers punch well above their weight in innovative output and entrepreneurship. Immigrants co-founded or played a major early role in Nvidia, Alphabet and Tesla. From Elon Musk to lesser-known figures such as Bhatt, many of these inventors and founders originally came to the U.S. on student visas. President Trump’s policies could disrupt that pipeline.
|
|
|
BarkBox apologizes for leaked message suspending Pride marketing.
BarkBox’s chief executive apologized after a leaked internal Slack message revealed that the dog-product subscription service would pause advertising its Pride merchandise in deference to the political environment.
“Right now,” the Slack message read in part, “pushing this promo risks unintentionally sending the message that ‘we’re not for you’ to a large portion of our audience.”
|
|
|
-
President Trump spoke Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and suggested after the call that one point leading to a breakdown in trade talks—the export of rare-earth minerals, which are critical to the U.S. auto industry—had been addressed.
-
The U.S. trade deficit collapsed in April, as tariffs took a huge bite out of imports.
-
OpenAI said it had disrupted several attempts to leverage its artificial-intelligence models for cyber threats and covert influence operations that likely originated from China.
-
Conversations between business leaders and senior Bank of Canada policymakers show companies no longer fear “catastrophic outcomes” from the abrupt change in U.S. trade policy, a central bank official said Thursday.
-
President Trump said Russia and Ukraine might need to “keep fighting” before either side is ready for a cease-fire.
-
Ukraine’s audacious drone attack wounded and embarrassed Moscow, but it also exposed a threat to Kyiv’s Western allies: Low-cost, high-tech strikes can deliver an increasingly potent punch to even the most heavily defended world powers.
-
Israel’s military said it was targeting an underground drone facility in southern Beirut on Thursday, in one of its largest strikes on Hezbollah assets since a cease-fire was agreed to in November.
-
Iran has ordered thousands of tons of ballistic-missile ingredients from China, people familiar with the transaction said, seeking to rebuild its military prowess as it discusses the future of its nuclear program with the U.S.
-
China’s central bank injected around $139 billion of medium-term liquidity into markets on Friday, a move likely aimed at cushioning against an emerging cash crunch as trade tensions simmer.
-
India’s central bank surprised markets with a jumbo rate cut, seizing on cooling inflation to frontload monetary easing and bolster economic growth amid heightened global uncertainty.
-
Russia’s central bank Friday lowered its key interest rate for the first time since late 2022 despite an inflation rate that remains well above its target.
-
Industrial production in the eurozone’s two largest economies declined in the first month of President Trump’s global tariff blitz, with goods exports to the U.S. from Germany also falling sharply.
-
Food prices fell in May as declines in corn and palm oil outweighed historically high prices for butter and bovine meat, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations showed on Friday.
|
|
|
|
56.3%
|
Percentage of North American financial firms not currently using AI in their compliance workflow that have no intention of implementing the technology in the next year, according to tech provider Global Relay.
|
|
|
|
|
Here is our weekly roundup of stories from across WSJ Pro that we think you’ll find useful.
|
|
|
-
Morgan Stanley has built its own AI tool to help modernize its legacy code—something it says existing tools on the market still struggle with.
-
After last year’s relative calm, U.S. companies are now dealing with rising logistics costs, supply-chain upheaval and uncertain consumer demand.
-
Climate startups are feeling the impact of President Trump’s attacks on the energy-transition sector, as funding and job cuts, operational halts and bankruptcies rack up.
-
Private equity is feeling the heat as buyout fund backers look for cash returns while firms hold tens of thousands of unsold companies.
|
|
|