The Volcker Rule should not hurt customers, says John Stumpf, Wells Fargo chairman/CEO.
welcome back to squawk. final thoughts with our guest host, wells fargo chairman and ceo john stumpf. volcker rule. we haven’t talked about it yet. does it impact you in a meaningful way and do you have a strong view? i have a view that it should not hurt customers. i can’t imagine that’s the intention of volcker or the congress. but the way the rules are coming down, they’re very broad in their prohibitions and very narrow in their permissions. let me give you one example that would be impacted. when we make somebody a mortgage, we give them a rate lock. in other words, we give them a free rate lock for 60 or 90 days. if rates go up even by a quarter point, that’s thousands of dollars over the life of a loan. if this gets implemented the wrong way, we might not be able to do that. because you won’t be able to buy swaps? exactly. we hedge that. we swap that. or else we have to have such a gigantic group of, you know, consultants and accountants and attorneys making sure that that doesn’t fit. so that’s just one small example of how — but you’re not in the proprietary trading business otherwise. it’s almost zero for us. we don’t have, like, a group that says proprietary trading — you have things that would qualify for that. yeah. or things like helping my brother with his corn crop, hedging that. or even managing our interest rate sensitivity we talked about before. you know, assets and liabilities. we use instruments for that. that reduces risk. that doesn’t improve the increased risk. i think this is a — you know, a big solution we hope you’ll come back again soon. becky and joe, andrew, thank
