John Stumpf is CEO of the Year

Wells Fargo's John Stumpf is CEO of the Year

Excerpt:

Wells Fargo & Co. didn't merely survive the economic tsunami that wiped out prominent financial institutions and transformed the Wall Street landscape. The San Francisco bank rode the wave, playing the upheaval to its advantage by picking up a crippled, but substantial, competitor on the cheap.

The roughly $13 billion acquisition of Wachovia Corp., completed on the final day of last year, converted the super regional bank into one of the nation's largest. Based on preliminary first-quarter results released this month, it's also among the strongest.

For that, the bank's leader, John Stumpf, is The Chronicle's Chief Executive Officer of the Year for 2008.

His office declined an interview request for this article, citing SEC rules in advance of the company's scheduled earning announcement on Wednesday.

Stumpf became CEO of Wells Fargo, San Francisco's largest private employer and one of the biggest charitable contributors, in June 2007.

The company would not have been in a position to seize the opportunities presented by the economic meltdown last year had it not largely avoided the boom time behavior that would eventually doom so many of its peers. Specifically, it offered far fewer of the exotic and now toxic mortgages that wiped out credit markets and sparked the takeover or dissolution of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual and scores of other lenders.

"We were the No. 1 mortgage company in this country in the early part of this decade, and all of a sudden we started to see people do things that we didn't understand," Stumpf said in an interview earlier this year, citing negative-amortization and payment-option mortgages.

"We gave up tens of billions of dollars in loan-origination volume and millions and millions of dollars in profit," he said. "But we didn't see how doing this would help customers succeed financially. We don't think lending money to somebody who we know can't pay us back serves anybody. Others did that because they were interested in short-term profits, and they got nailed."

Comment: I've met John. Impressive guy!