John Stumpf5:00
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Wow, Tony, I could listen to you all day. You know, that might have been the second best introduction I've ever had. I was in Texas last week, the guy introduced me, I did it myself. Other than that one, it was perfect. First of all, thank you for having me today. Bankers don't get invited out a lot, so it's nice to be with such a great group of people. I'm going to share three things today and then Tony and I will have a conversation. I want to talk a little bit about the economy, the US economy, and we have a particularly important and interesting view of the economy being the nation's largest home lender, small business lender, one of the major auto lenders, commercial real estate, energy, and so forth. So we see a lot of the real economy. I also want to align a bit on what I see in the Bay Area economy. And finally, I want to talk a bit about our company and our industry because lots of innovation is going on. But before I do that, you all should know how much I love living here. I've lived and worked in four major cities in the US: my native Minnesota, I found my way from northern Minnesota, a little town that had about this many people in it, to Minneapolis-St. Paul. Then I went to Denver, Colorado, San Antonio, Texas, and then San Francisco, California. Came here in late 2002, and the changes I have seen in these 14 years or 13 and a half years is incredible. I did have an interesting experience I want to share with you. So I came here to run the consumer side of the business across the country, and as part of that business, we have thousands of branches, we have at that time we had an online business, which of course we do, we had a phone bank, we had other things. And by early 2003, I was starting to go out and meet people who I had not met before who worked for us. And one particular day, I had an appointment to go to Concord, and we had a large phone bank operation in a 10-story building or so in Concord. And people who know me know that I'm notorious for being a bad driver and getting lost. So knowing that, Dick Kovacevich, the CEO at the time, said, 'I'm going to give you a real break today. I'm going to have my driver take you out there.' So that's a pretty big deal. So I put on my best suit, clean starched shirt, tie, I crawled in the backseat of Dick's Cadillac, and we went out to Concord. As we pulled up to the phone bank building, as I got out of the backseat, I immediately knew I had a big problem. I was out of fashion and character. I didn't get the dress code right. There wasn't a suit and tie within 10 miles. So as I walked into the building, these are all of our team members, none of them know me, and they're looking at me. And I just make it to the elevator before it closes, and I go on the elevator, I press the button, I turn around, everybody's at my back. And as we start going up, I hear it gets very quiet. Some guy says, 'Who's the guy in the suit?' Another guy says, 'That's Gray Davis. He's being recalled.' So later that day, I come back to the bank. Dick said, 'How'd your day go?' I said, 'Dick, it was a terrible day.' He said, 'What's wrong?' I said, 'My people think I'm Gray Davis.' He says, 'Don't worry, everybody thinks I'm Arnold.'
So let me talk about the US economy. We went through the worst downturn in our nation's memory, but for those who lived through the Great Depression, and I'm lucky that my parents are still alive. My dad's 94, my mom's close, but she's still fussy about her age. Let's just say she's about that age. And they are children of the Great Depression that never left their mentality for their entire life. I don't know what history will actually call 2008, but it was a very difficult time for our country, for our economy, and for lots of our citizens and participants, small businessmen, women, homeowners, and so forth. So we had this big shock in 2008, and we've been building back since. And there are some remarkable things about this recovery. We've had 73 consecutive months of positive job growth in the private sector, unheard of in the record books of any kind. And last couple years, we've averaged over 200,000 jobs a month. We actually had a disappointing number in April, 160,000. Most of us would, in historical terms, be thrilled about 160,000 jobs. 2015 was the best year for autos and auto sales since maybe the year 2000, if my memory serves me right. And it bodes well for the future. The average American car is over 11 years old. Commercial real estate is booming. As I look, as I travel to cities, and I do, I travel all the time, one of my favorite things to do is count the number of cranes in the air. I don't know if these things multiply, if they meet each other, I don't know what's going on, but there's cranes everywhere. The private sector infrastructure spend is in high gear. Campuses are being rebuilt, the core of cities are being rebuilt, people are moving back. You see that everywhere, not only in the primary major cities in America, but even in the secondary and the tertiary cities. People want to live back close to the urban core. If you look at low energy prices, while it's been difficult on the energy patch, for the rest of us, this is good news. For those who have hydrocarbons as part of their operating, whether it's an ag producer, a manufacturer, a distributor, a homeowner, a consumer who puts gas in at the pump, it's been a real, it's almost like a tax deduction. And there's other parts of the economy that are also showing real signs of strength. On the other side, because this is the economy that you never say the economy is good without using the word 'but'. This is the 'but' recovery. Everything's good, but... and the 'but' side is wages have not grown the way we hoped they would have grown. Housing has not responded in the way housing we thought would have responded. As a percentage of homeowners, of people who have a dwelling, the homeowner percentage has come down and continues to come down. The rest of the world's influence on us, we can feel it, we know it, it's a global economy, and their economies are in tougher shape or have recovered slower than we have, and we feel that influence. So it looks to me like it looks, because I agree with a lot of the consensus out there, that this will probably be about a 2% GDP growth year. I think the big wild card is will the consumer continue to spend and increase their spending. Consumer balance sheets are in the best shape they've been in in decades. Last quarter when we reported our earnings, I made a statement that today 15% of household earnings go for debt service. It's the lowest number we've had in years and years and years because people are paying down debt and interest rates are so low. But consumers tend to be spending more money today on experiences as opposed to things. Restaurants are full, theaters are full, airlines are full, stores are not so full.
As it relates to the Bay Area economy, everybody would love to have the problem we have. Not only are we seeing terrific private sector infrastructure spend, we're seeing some public sector infrastructure spend. In addition to that, the housing challenge here is a bit different than the rest of the country. I think the reason that we're not seeing, even though housing starts, new house starts are up 22% a year ago across the country, in other parts of the country, they don't have some of the challenges we have, like affordability and availability. We've had too many years in San Francisco and the Bay Area, San Francisco specifically and the Bay Area generally, where it was too difficult to manufacture housing, whether single family or multifamily. We need to fix that. We need to allow for the people who work here to be able to live and afford to raise a family here. The speaker before talked about the fact that San Francisco and the Bay Area is much more than technology, and it is. Four of the 10 top market cap companies in America are headquartered in the Bay Area, and they're not all technology. So as I see San Francisco, if we can work together to solve for infrastructure and solve for housing, we will have a leg or two up so we can continue to make the investments and produce products and services that continue to challenge and change the world.
Let me go to the third area where I spend most of my time, and that's our company and our industry. Tony stole a line from me I was going to mention. I will mention that Wells Fargo and San Francisco have had a 164-year love affair. We started here in 1852. The state was two years old. We had about 50,000 people total population in the whole Bay Area. Where was the capital that year? Not Benicia now, Vallejo. Benicia was a year after, San Jose was a year before. The year of incorporation was in someplace south, I can't recall exactly, but it went to Sacramento the year after in 1854. So we've come from humble beginnings along with San Francisco. We've grown up together. Today we have 270,000 team members across the globe, most of them in the US. 97% of our revenues are here from the US. We served one in three customers last year. Our investment in communities totaled $281 million, number two among all corporations. We helped over 16,000 nonprofits with partnership dollars to help them in their goals. In San Francisco and the Bay Area, we have 17,000 team members, 8,000 here in San Francisco. We're the city's largest employer. We did $20 million of philanthropy last year, ranking us in the top quartile, helping over 900 nonprofits. And if I were going to ask you what city in the world is home to the headquarters of the most valuable bank on the planet, what would you say? Well, you already know the answer, but I'll give you some, I'll tease you. Maybe Paris, maybe London, oh, it's got to be New York. It'd be San Francisco. Now, there's a couple of state-owned banks in China that would argue with that, but let's put them aside. We're the 15th largest bank in the world, not that we ever set out to be large. We're not even number one or two in the US, but our market cap, the number of shares times our stock price, makes us the most valuable bank on the planet. And we owe much to this community, this area, and this state for the success we've enjoyed.
So in our industry, you're reading a lot and hearing a lot about the so-called 'fintech', which is a made-up word, half financial, well, just a little bit financial, and mostly technology, and they put the two together. It's also known as shadow banks or marketplace something. And rightfully so, that industry is getting a lot of visibility as they innovate, as they provide products and services consumers, small businessmen and women, entrepreneurs, and large businesses want. I think some of the biggest fintechs are the regulated side of the industry, and Wells Fargo in particular. If we were not an innovative company, we would still have stagecoaches on the freeway. We were the first bank to be actively online. Now, Tony mentioned 18 years ago, Norwest, where my part of the family I came from, and Wells Fargo merged. At the time, Norwest did not have an internet offering. Now, Al Gore had invented the internet, we just had not heard about it in Minnesota. But thank goodness the folks from Wells did. And we were the first bank in our industry, and our bank specifically helped create Visa and MasterCard. It was called BankAmericard. We created the ATM machines, we created internet banking, bill pay, all the things that we just take for granted today. Ten years ago, we didn't have a mobile offering. Today, mobile banking is our largest single channel of all of our channels. 16 million customers see us, access us, transact with us through mobile devices. Every minute at Wells Fargo, we have 13,500 customer interactions. All you, you go one, two, three, four, five, a thousand transactions just happened, and many of those happen through digits. Much of that technology invented just down the road from where we are today. And we're going to see more innovation in our industry. You'll be able to go to one of our ATMs this year without your card and use your mobile device to activate your ATM machine. We'll be the last generation to use the term credit card and debit card. Why need a card? Same reason if you take a photograph, why do you need film? It'll be accessed through a mobile device of one type or another. We'll be the last generation to ever use usernames and passwords. You ready? Can I agree? In fact, today when you use your Apple iPhone and you put your thumb or your imprint on it to unlock the phone, you touch the Wells Fargo app and you touch your thumb and the app comes up and you're online. And you're going to continue to see more and more innovations over time. Things that are possible today in our industry were unthinkable two and three years ago. Things that will be possible next year and the year after are unknowable today. So as we see customers rightfully demanding more convenience, more value, more clarity, and yes, more safety, we as an industry will continue to step up to that. And safety is an important thing. When I think about what it is that we really do and what is the core element, what is the DNA of our relationships with our customers, it's trust. And we are spending a boatload of dollars, more than a boatload, a whole armada, on cybersecurity. When customers do business with us, they want to make sure their business is private, it's secure, it's not shared, not sold, and not lost.
Let me end by, we're surely in a political season this year, and I'd like just to offer a couple of thoughts. And no, I'm not going to tell you who I'm voting for. You know, Dr. or none of the above. So we'll... but I will say this: we're the luckiest people on the planet. We live in the best country ever known. We share borders with friendly neighbors. We are a group of people that do things and make stuff and innovate. We have the best military. We change government every two, four, six, eight years without tanks on the street. We have the deepest, most transparent, best capitalized financial service industry on the planet. But as we look to the future, we're never going to save our way out of our problems. We're never going to tax our way out of our problems. We're not going to redistribute our way out of our challenges. We're going to grow our way out of our problems. Growth is the cure to almost everything. When I got in the industry in 1975, 23 or 24% of our economy were things that we manufactured. I grew up on a farm. Either we were a Chevy farm or a Ford. A couple people in town had a Chrysler, but we didn't really count them. We made those things here. The furniture we had in our homes was made in the Carolinas. Those who could afford a TV, an RCA or a Zenith, was made here. Our clothing was made here. Today, less than 10% of our economy represents manufactured goods. We're not going to manufacture everything here, nor should we, but we surely could do more. But the biggest aha today, if we want growth, is infrastructure. As I mentioned earlier, across the United States, the private sector is building like we've never seen before. New buildings, new facilities, housing, industrial buildings, a lot of it in the urban core. Today is the best time to do a huge public sector infrastructure spend and investment. Interest rates are at 50-year lows. Commodities are at all-time lows in many cases. You take in real dollars, and there's an able and ready workforce. So we can match what's already been done on the private sector with what needs to be done in the public sector. And when that happens, we all participate in the growth of the economy. Because after all, good jobs are more than just good salaries. It's about the decency and the sense of pride, the dignity of being part of the solution. So thank you for your time. Thank you for giving me a little bit of this time this afternoon. And I think Tony's coming up now, we're going to have a bit of a 'great, less filling' event.