Wells Fargo’s plan to squeeze fees from customers

[kpete]

Source: Tucson Sentinal

Posted Dec 1, 2010, 10:35 am

Marian Wang ProPublica

In recent months, rules from the Federal Reserve have made it harder for banks to impose hefty overdraft fees when customers try to make debit transactions or ATM withdrawals without enough money in their checking accounts.

Before the rule change, banks could automatically sign up customers for what they often referred to as overdraft coverage or overdraft protection. The so-called “protection,” it’s worth emphasizing, isn’t from overdraft fees themselves—it’s from the potential embarrassment or hassle that comes when a transaction is rejected due to insufficient funds. The “protection” also allows the bank to collect hefty fees for covering such transactions.

But if the past is any indication, banks will go to great lengths to protect those fees, which are big business. As the New York Times recently reported, banks make more on those fees than they do on penalties from credit cards.

To give a glimpse of just how hard banks have worked to keep overdraft fees flowing, we review some internal e-mails and memos from earlier in the decade that Wells Fargo turned over in response to a class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco. The documents—which we’ve loaded into our document viewer— sometimes veer into banker-speak, but we’ve tried to translate as needed.

Read more: http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/120110_bank_fees

[Initech]

1. Reverse Robin Hoods.

[Democrats_win]

2. More Americans are becoming "unbanked" because of this.

They aren't putting up with it. It's interesting because we are living in one of the rare times in history when it's better to have cash in the mattress than in the bank. Especially since interest rates are so low. This may not last forever, though.

[arcane1]

3. My employer is part of that lawsuit as well...

and in the last quarterly conference call with the CEO's, the CEO's said one of their main upcoming goals is to "increase fee-based income".

Fucking crazy.

[jotsy]

4. Everybody here know about a citizen's run on the banks on December 7?

Seeing this made me wonder what's become of the 'Move Your Money' campaign initiated by the Huffington Post.

<http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/24-2>

[4dsc]

5. Two words-Credit Union. nt