It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Electric car maker Tesla will reportedly freeze hiring and go through a fresh round of layoffs as job cuts at marquee companies small and large, including Twitter and Meta, have roiled a range of tech companies across the Bay Area.
Electric car blog Electrek first reported the story.
The cuts will reportedly come next quarter. Tesla did not respond to an emailed request for comment, and has not had a media department for some time. It wasn’t clear which departments or locations could be affected.
The company moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas last year, but still has offices in the Bay Area and a large manufacturing facility in Fremont that employs around 10,000 people.
Tesla’s stock has trended down recently, dipping since CEO Elon Musk took over the social media site Twitter earlier this year. Despite topping $300 per share in the fall, shares had dropped below the $140 per share mark as of Wednesday.
Tesla investors have taken to Twitter in recent days to criticize the company and for Musk appearing to spend little time recently running the electric car maker since his turbulent takeover at Twitter.
Musk told Tesla investors on an earnings call in October that demand for the company’s electric vehicles was strong and that the company expected to sell every car it produced well into the foreseeable future.
The company reported revenues of $21.5 billion during its most recent quarterly report, slightly below Wall Street expectations.
The company has continued to tell investors it expects to increase vehicle deliveries by around 50% each year.
That is just, like, Wells Fargo entered into a complicated contract with its auto-loan borrowers, and the contract provided that in certain circumstances, years in the future, Wells Fargo would have to send some money to the borrowers, and Wells Fargo just stuck the contract in a drawer somewhere and ignored it, and so did the borrowers, so it never sent them the money. Very understandable, for the borrowers, who are busy people who have jobs and lives and are not necessarily reading every word of their auto-loan contracts. Less understandable, for the bank, which is a bank.Or:
Guaranteed Asset Protection (GAP) contracts are a type of debt cancellation contract (DCC) that generally relieve the borrower from the obligation to pay the remaining amount of the borrower’s loan on the vehicle above the vehicle’s depreciated value in the case of a major accident or theft. The auto dealer markets GAP coverage to the borrower and is paid the GAP fee. However, borrowers often finance GAP fees as part of their auto loan at origination and the GAP contract becomes part of the auto loan contract. If the borrower pays off the loan early, or the GAP contract otherwise terminates, the borrower may be entitled to a refund of the unearned portion of the GAP fee that they financed when first buying the vehicle. Such refund obligations usually are governed by the terms of the GAP contract executed between the borrower and the originating dealer, with GAP contracts sometimes requiring that the borrower make a written request to the originating dealer for a GAP refund. Respondent, as the owner and servicer of the GAP contracts, did not ensure that unearned GAP fees were refunded to all borrowers who paid off their loans early.
It is a little hard to tell how that one would work? Like, the rule is something like “certain mortgage borrowers need to be offered this loan modification.” Wells Fargo went through its records to see who needed to be offered the modification, and decided not to offer it to these 190 people because they were dead. They were not dead, so, a failure of record-keeping by Wells Fargo. But also … they were not offered the modification, so they kept paying their mortgages?[1] Like every month Wells Fargo would get a check from these people whom it had erroneously identified as deceased? If you got a check every month from someone who you thought was dead, you would be surprised, and presumably you would update your views. (You might think “aha, they are not dead,” or you might think “wow ghosts are real and very financially responsible,” or you might call them to say “so are you dead or what?”) But Wells Fargo is not a human with normal human intuitions. It is a big bureaucratic institution with databases that don’t necessarily talk to each other in sensible ways, and it blithely went along cashing checks from people while also believing they were dead.Or:
Another error occurred from July 2013 until September 2018, when Respondent did not offer no-application modifications to approximately 190 borrowers with Government Sponsored Entity (GSE) loans. Respondent erroneously identified these borrowers as deceased and therefore did not assess their eligibility for modifications. Respondent is paying approximately $2.4 million in remediation to these borrowers.
Imagine being the sort of person who gets ahead in banking and becomes a senior executive at Wells Fargo. One of your subordinates comes to you to be like “I have an idea for a new product that will attract a lot of customers and bring in a lot of revenue.” Another one of your subordinates comes to you to be like “sometimes we charge people late fees even after agreeing not to, because our systems don’t talk to each other very well; I have an idea for how to modernize them to make sure that doesn’t happen. It will cost a lot of money, but in exchange we, uh, won’t get to charge as many late fees?” Which subordinate would you want to spend more time with? Who sounds like more fun?In the CFPB’s eleven years of existence, Wells Fargo has consistently been one of the most problematic repeat offenders of the banks and credit unions we supervise. …
Put simply, Wells Fargo is a corporate recidivist that puts one third of American households at risk of harm. Finding a permanent resolution to this bank’s pattern of unlawful behavior is a top priority. Today, CFPB is announcing an important step toward that goal: restitution for victims of Wells Fargo’s widespread illegal activities. …
While today’s order addresses a number of consumer abuses, it should not be read as a sign that Wells Fargo has moved past its longstanding problems or that the CFPB’s work here is done. Importantly, the order does not provide immunity for any individuals, nor, for example, does it release claims for any ongoing illegal acts or practices.
While $3.7 billion may sound like a lot, the CFPB recognizes that this alone will not fix Wells Fargo’s fundamental problems. Over the past several years, Wells Fargo executives have taken steps to fix longstanding problems, but it is also clear that they are not making rapid progress. We are concerned that the bank’s product launches, growth initiatives, and other efforts to increase profits have delayed needed reform.
And lots of computer engineers tweeted and emailed to be like “no, actually, it is a hard problem of computer science to have a big database of who has what, and to update it instantly and reliably to reflect transactions from many different sources.” And I was like, sure, fine, I guess. I still feel like I was entitled to be right: A bank is, at its heart, a computer for keeping track of who has money, and for updating its ledger as people send and receive money. And at a high level you and I could describe how we’d expect that computer to work — “if I deposit $100 in an ATM, the bank will increase the number in my account by $100,” that sort of thing — and we will be disappointed if it doesn’t work that way, if the bank loses track of who has the money or how much they have, or if it doesn’t update its ledger promptly or process transactions in the right order. If the bank messes up and says “look I am sorry but keeping track of money is a hard job and you can’t expect us to do it with 100% accuracy,” we will say things like “yes we can” and “that is literally exactly what we expect of you” and “if keeping track of the money is too hard for you then maybe you should not be a bank” and “now you have to pay an enormous fine.” And yet, sure, empirically, banks do sometimes mess it up. It’s not as easy as it sounds.If you have U.S. dollars in a bank account at JPMorgan Chase & Co., and I have U.S. dollars in a bank account at JPMorgan Chase & Co., and I want to send you 100 of my dollars, what we do is I tell JPMorgan to subtract 100 from the number of dollars in my bank account and add 100 to the number of dollars in your bank account. This gets dressed up in a lot of procedures, because it would be bad if JPMorgan got the math wrong or if it moved money from one account to another without getting the proper authorizations, but as a matter of, like, computer science, it is dead easy. JPMorgan keeps a list of people and how many dollars they have, and you and I both trust JPMorgan to keep that list (that’s what it means that we bank there!), and so we just tell JPMorgan to update the list to reflect the transaction between us.
Here is the CFPB’s consent order from yesterday, which is basically just a litany of “Wells Fargo’s computers messed up.” For instance:The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is ordering Wells Fargo Bank to pay more than $2 billion in redress to consumers and a $1.7 billion civil penalty for legal violations across several of its largest product lines. The bank’s illegal conduct led to billions of dollars in financial harm to its customers and, for thousands of customers, the loss of their vehicles and homes. Consumers were illegally assessed fees and interest charges on auto and mortgage loans, had their cars wrongly repossessed, and had payments to auto and mortgage loans misapplied by the bank. Wells Fargo also charged consumers unlawful surprise overdraft fees and applied other incorrect charges to checking and savings accounts. Under the terms of the order, Wells Fargo will pay redress to the over 16 million affected consumer accounts, and pay a $1.7 billion fine, which will go to the CFPB's Civil Penalty Fund, where it will be used to provide relief to victims of consumer financial law violations.
If you owe Wells Fargo money on a car loan, and you don’t pay it, and you have a payment deferment, they won’t charge you a fee, but if you don’t have a payment deferment they will. But if you have a payment deferment, but they don’t write it down in the right place, they will also charge you the fee, and then they will get in trouble. In some sense this is profit-maximizing behavior by Wells Fargo: If they agree to defer payments, and then charge you the fees anyway, they will make more money in fees. But it doesn’t seem intentional, and the CFPB doesn’t think it was. (Why say you agree to the deferment, and then charge the fees?) It seems like a failure of systems, of “technology, audit and compliance”: Wells Fargo did not do a good job of keeping track of deferments, so it sometimes charged fees by mistake.Respondent also assessed borrowers erroneous fees and interest because of technology, audit, and compliance failures. As an example, from at least 2011 until at least March 2019, Respondent sometimes incorrectly entered the effective date of a payment deferment in, or omitted it from, its servicing system-of-record, which resulted in $26.5 million in erroneously assessed late fees to more than 688,000 borrower accounts.
(Continued)Or:
From at least 2011 through 2022, Respondent experienced other types of servicing errors, which had the potential to contribute to a borrower’s delinquency, and in some cases led to improper repossessions. For example, Respondent repossessed vehicles despite the borrower having made a payment or entering into an agreement to forestall the repossession.
https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0601101050Medicare beneficiaries with an IRMAA who meet certain criteria can request that we make a new initial determination of their IRMAA.
NOTE: The original IRMAA decision takes effect and continues until we make a new initial determination. If we make a new initial determination in the beneficiary’s favor, we retroactively refund the excess IRMAA amount paid.
https://citywire.com/pro-buyer/news/boston-pm-shuts-shop-months-after-losing-20bn-subadvisor-spot/a1188410The firm was axed from the fund following what Harbor referred to as ‘a sustained period of underperformance.’
The fund had lagged its benchmark, the MSCI EAFE NR, in every calendar year from 2013 to 2017, according to Lipper data, although was ahead for the year [2018] at the time of the termination.
...
The fund had also experienced outflows with investors pulling money in every quarter from the last three months of 2014 onward. In total, over that time to the end of Q2 2018, the fund suffered net outflows of $28.9 billion, according to data from Lipper.
https://citywire.com/pro-buyer/news/harbor-drops-pimco-from-1-6bn-bond-fund/a1592923The fund suffered heavy outflows in October 2014 following Gross’s abrupt exit from Pimco and has seen money leave in the vast majority of months since then. Over the last five years [through 2021], it has returned an annualized 4.43%, ahead of the Morningstar Intermediate Core-Plus Bond category average 4.12% and the Bloomberg US Universal’s 4.0%.
https://www.evidenceinvestor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/General-Criteria-for-SP-U.S.-Index-Membership-Roger-Bos-Michele-Ruotolo-September-2000.pdfit is important to reiterate that just because a given stock might not represent its Index well does not mean that it will definitely be removed from that Index, just that the potential exists. We go back to the definition above and ask ourselves, “If we were starting this Index afresh today, would this company be a member?” If the answer is no, the stock would seriously be considered as a removal candidate.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved. Powered by Vanilla
