You want to react to that? I'm just curious what you think about interest rates and the Fed and maybe who you might even want to be the next Fed chair. How much do you care?
Care a lot. But thrilled with the choices that are on the table. I think they all make great choices and we've got a process to get from here to there and I think we're in a really good place.
Yeah, listen, I think first of all, growth trajectory is everything that we see is really, really good. And so it's more likely than not that growth will be stronger than people expect. And for us, you know, as a US company where so much of our business is in the US, we feel great about it. You know, rates we can debate, you know, that they likely will go lower and that's probably a good thing for a period of time. How low they go I think is dependent on all the other data that we see and I think that would be a pretty good place to be and I think the markets would certainly feel good about it.
Okay, the other big issue and I know you've been probably asked and have had to answer the question a million times this week: credit cards. You're in the credit card business.
You like the credit card business. I have one. I assume you like the credit card business a little bit less if you had to cap interest rates at 10% across the board.
Yeah. So, first of all, remember the president has not suggested that rates get capped forever across the board. So, just as we think about the business, it is a great business. It's a really important business. It'll continue to be that way. We offer products that are well below 10% for an extended period of time. So, I understand that. I think, you know, we just got to be very focused on what we're trying to solve and what we don't want to do is put in artificial price controls that could be harmful at a period of time where it matters most to Americans that need it.
So Jamie Dimon, you know, said quite publicly that he thinks this is dangerous and the question is how dangerous is it? What do you think the true ramifications of something like this, even if it was just for one year, would really be?
13 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Scharf, C. (2026, January 22). Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf on state of the economy, credit card rate cap and company outlook [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/655337/
MLA
Charlie Scharf. "Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf on state of the economy, credit card rate cap and company outlook." CNBC Television, 22 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/655337/.
BibTeX
@misc{scharf2026_655337,
author = {Charlie Scharf},
title = {Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf on state of the economy, credit card rate cap and company outlook},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/655337/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
