MOST SHARED
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Share Their 'Optimism' With Eager Columbia Business Students
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Disney Profit, Sales Top Street Forecasts; Shares Jump
- Warren Buffett's $100,000 Offer and $500,000 Advice for Columbia Business School Students
- Meet The Leaders of the New Retail Revolution
- Disney CFO and Parks Chief to Swap Roles
- Despite Rhetoric, Obama Has Limited Options To Boost Jobs
- Is Euphoric Market Ignoring Warning Signs?
- Housing Recovery 'Still In Uncharted Territory': HUD Secretary
- Job Market Politics to Keep Interest Rates Low
- AIG, Symbol of Crisis, Watches Its Stock Zoom Back
- Disney Profit, Sales Top Street Forecasts; Shares Jump
- Bill Gates Praises Apple's Jobs for 'Saving the Company'
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Cramer: The Real Reason Stocks Fell Thursday
- Is Euphoric Market Ignoring Warning Signs?
- Video Game Sales Plunge, but Have They Hit Bottom?
- Despite Rhetoric, Obama Has Few Options to Boost Jobs
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- Gold Is a Bad Inflation Hedge—Like Oil: Stock Picker
- Intel's Andy Bryant Offers An Explanation
- US 'Actively Working' on Weaker Dollar: Fund Manager
- Options Boil on Biotech Buyout Rumors
- Warren Buffett's $100,000 Offer and $500,000 Advice for Columbia Business School Students
- Activision Blizzard's "Modern Warfare 2" Sales Break Records
- 5-Star Manager's 5 Stocks for Changing Markets
- What's The Forecast from Retailers? Proceed With Caution
Text Size 
Wells Fargo, which has sidestepped many of the credit and liquidity problems plaguing U.S. mortgage lenders, believes the nation's housing slump is the worst since the Great Depression and is far from over, Chief Executive John Stumpf said Thursday.
 |
AP A Wells Fargo Bank in Palo Alto, Calif. |
Despite Stumpf's assurances about his company's position, shares of Wells Fargo [WFC
Loading...
()
] fell 3.85 percent on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday.
Stumpf said the second-largest U.S. mortgage lender and fifth-largest U.S. bank is "not immune" from the storm, but is well-positioned to ride it out, despite expectations for "elevated" credit losses from home equity loans into 2008.
He also said the San Francisco-based bank has "minimal" exposure to the collateralized debt obligations and asset-backed commercial paper conduits that have caused well over $40 billion of write-downs industry wide, with more expected.
"We have not seen a nationwide decline in housing like this since the Great Depression," Stumpf said at a Merrill Lynch banking conference in New York.
"I don't think we're in the ninth inning of unwinding this," he continued. "If we are, it's an extra-inning game."
Stumpf's comments came hours after Barclays announced a 1.3 billion pound ($2.7 billion) write-down for losses on securities linked to U.S. subprime mortgages.
Other banks to announce write-downs topping $1 billion this month include Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Morgan Stanley and Wachovia. Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual have also seen results suffer from losses tied to mortgages.
At Wells Fargo, rising delinquencies and defaults limited profit growth to 4 percent in the third quarter, the slowest in more than six years, though net income was a record $2.28 billion. Wells Fargo said the credit losses related more to the severity of bad loans than the frequency.
The bank made $216 billion of home loans from January to September, second nationally to Countrywide Financial, and services about $1.5 trillion.
Print
Email
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spoke to Columbia students, and Buffett made the students a startling offer.
- They may have wrecked their companies or saved our economy. Tell us what you think.
- Big pharma embraces social media, but how much should a tightly regulated sector say on Facebook or Twitter?
- A European dating site finds lovelorn singles from one country to be consistently uglier. Which is it?
- Contributor David Pogue looks at two of the latest efforts to perfect the digital pocket camera.
- PepsiCo is ramping up its onsite health facilities for workers.
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes