Perhaps, like the apparently mythical figure of the investor who’s sure, in spite of all available evidence and history and the apparent will of an angry God, that Wells Fargo has turned a corner and is ready to start printing money for shareholders, there really was a bank out there somewhere in this vast and exceedingly stupid land that looked at its problems and thought, “There’s only one solution here: John Stumpf.” Perhaps these people stopped reading the financial press in early 2016 and believed, like John Cryan before them, that there was no finer bank out there, and only one man who’d led that bank to the promised land. Well, we have bad news for that bank today: The dream of a Stumpfian renaissance is well and truly dead.
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