Matt Levine, Columnist

Wells Fargo Must Be Better Before It Gets Bigger

Also crypto-Bond-villains, Uber and regulation, health-care bankers, non-competes and more flamethrower financing.

February 5, 2018 at 2:58 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Oh Wells Fargo.

Janet Yellen kicked Wells Fargo & Co. on her way out the door at the Federal Reserve on Friday, announcing that the Fed will "restrict the growth of the firm until it sufficiently improves its governance and controls." The bank's total assets, averaged over any two-quarter period, will not be allowed to exceed its total assets at the end of 2017, until it gets its act together to the Fed's satisfaction. The Fed's action came in a response to Wells Fargo's recent string of regulatory failings, of which the most embarrassing was the 2016 revelation that Wells Fargo bankers, pressured to meet sales quotas, had opened millions of fake customer accounts.