When you buy a shirt and the shopkeeper tries to sell you a necktie, that’s cross-selling. When you pick up your to-eat-at-the-desk sandwich and the guy at the register persuades you that you need some potato chips, that’s cross-selling. When thousands of Wells Fargo employees respond to pressure and the bonus system by opening two million deposit and credit-card accounts for customers without telling them, or in fictitious names, that’s fraud. When the practice continues for at least five years with the knowledge of the CEO, it calls into question whether the America’s largest bank by market capitalization, our number-one mortgage issuer, number-one auto and small business lender, second largest debit-card issuer, and third largest bank by assets is merely managed by incompetents, or is simply too big to manage.

All of this occurred under the nose of one Carrie Tolstedt, the executive responsible for the Wells Fargo’s 6,000 branches. Tolstedt, known as “the watchmaker” because of her obsessive attention to detail, “retired” from her supervisory role in July, to use the euphemism favored in the industry, but will remain with the bank until year-end. At the time of her retirement announcement, the bank was discussing its cross-selling practices with regulators. Unlike the 5,300 Wells employees who have been fired, sans severance, and are probably in dire financial straits, Ms. Tolstedt, who has been awarded some $20 million in annual bonuses from 2010-to-2015 according to Richard Selby, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, in part because of the earnings growth from fraudulent cross-selling, will return to her native Nebraska with a goodbye gift of $125 million in stock options. CEO John Stumpf called her a “standard-bearer of our culture, a champion for our customers, and a role model for responsible, principled and inclusive leadership.”