A partnership between two California investment firms paid nearly $36.8 million for a Wells Fargo regional operating center in West Raleigh, according to Wake County property records.

An affiliate of Oaktree Capital Management and National Financial Realty acquired the 450,393-square-foot building as part of a 40-building portfolio of Wells Fargo leased properties. The two announced the $240 million deal earlier this month.

The largest chunk of the 3.4 million-square-foot portfolio is in North Carolina. It includes 8 buildings and 1.2 million square feet in Winston-Salem, Winterville, Burlington, Goldsboro and Smithfield.

All the buildings are leased long-term to Wells Fargo.

Wachovia Bank, now Wells Fargo, will pay $58.75 million to North Carolina and 25 other states as part of a multistate settlement for its part in a bid rigging scheme that defrauded local governments, hospitals and schools, Attorney General Roy Cooper said Thursday.
 
The settlement resolves allegations that Wachovia defrauded cities and counties, schools, colleges, hospitals and other entities that purchased a type of investment through the bank called municipal bond derivatives.

State Sen. Ellie Kinnaird reports on local Occupy Wall Street-related matters in her latest newsletter to constituents.

The Orange County Democrat says  the Chapel Hill Friends Meeting provided Thanksgiving dinner for the Occupy Chapel Hill group.  "The homeless have, of course, found Occupy, so presumably some of them enjoyed it too," she says.

"At N.C. State, the CEO of Wells Fargo (John Stumpf), newly arrived in North Carolina having bought our historic Wachovia Bank, had his speech interrupted by various students and Occupiers," Kinnaird continues. 

"I wrote him a letter suggesting the protesters have a valid message and that he could take an important step by reducing his $18.9 million compensation to no more than 100 times his lowest paid worker.  Japan’s ratio is 12:1 and after the U.S., the highest is Venezuela’s at 50:1; the U.S.’s ratio is a startling 475:1.  He could also set a policy to only award bonuses for stellar performance (as opposed to driving the economic bus into the ditch and ruining the lives of families)."

The CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, will be in Raleigh Nov. 30 to discuss the future of the financial services industry.

Stumpf's talk is part of a lecture series put on by N.C. State's Poole College of Management. His lecture is titled "The State of the Financial Services Industry."

The event is being held in the Nelson Hall Auditorium, 2800 Founders Drive, at the corner of Hillsborough Street and Dan Allen Drive, from 4:15 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.

The lecture is free and no reservations are required to attend.

Sara Appel, a graduate instructor at Duke University, plans to close her Wells Fargo bank account this week. It wasn't a difficult decision, she said. She'd never opened one.

The 32-year-old literature grad student, had been a Wachovia customer for several years and only became a Wells Fargo client when the California-based bank bought Wachovia.

"One day I was a Wachovia customer and then I was a Wells Fargo customer, whether I liked it or not," she said.

Next Saturday (Nov. 12) , organizers with movemoneydurham.org, part of Occupy Durham, hope others will join Appel, as the movement seeks to move money from big banks to local banks and credit unions.

About 75 people attended a rally yesterday in CCB Plaza, where credit unions provided information on their services. Among protesters' main points, printed on a flier at the rally, were these:

- Credit unions are nonprofits; banks are for profit.

- Credit unions educate their members; banks have negotiated mortgages even though they gave borrowers mortgages they would be unable to pay back.

- Credit unions reinvest in their communites; most major banks took a government bailout but retain "staggering profits."

"I think banks are banking on us forgetting what happened a few years ago," said Appel, one of the organizers. "They're responsible for the situation we're in."

A reader complained about Sunday's Wells Fargo ad, which was four pages and  wrapped around our front news section. In a letter to the editor, the reader said the ad was "beyond appalling"; that we had sold our most important attribute (the front page); and that doing so would lead to a decline in customers and revenue.

Advertisers value the readership and impact of The N&O. That's good for the health of the newspaper. In recent years, advertisers have looked more and more for innovative ways to get their message out. For some time, we have published ads that wrapped around the front section and covered the left half of the front page. 

This was the first time an ad covered the entire front page. In my perfect world, the front-page stories would not be covered. But we don't live in a perfect world. Advertising pays most of our bills. The more advertising we get, the more journalists we can employ. The Sunday ad in no way compromised the quality of the front page. Most readers removed the ad and proceeded to dig into their Sunday paper. Rack sales were strong (up considerably from the same weekend a year ago). I did not receive a single complaint from a reader, other than the one published letter.

I want to employ as many reporters and photographers as possible because  democracy functions best when the press is free and strong. The more reporters, the better.  The revenue from Sunday's Wells Fargo ad will pay the salary of a veteran reporter for a year. I hope we get another similar ad soon.

--John Drescher

Banks are test driving yet another fee.

Starting in October in five states, Wells Fargo will charge customers $3 per month if they use their debit card for purchases or payments, Charlotte Observer staff writer Rick Rothacker reports.

Customers can avoid the fee if they don’t use their card or by signing up for certain checking accounts.

The guinea pigs will be customers who opened business and personal accounts in Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Georgia and Washington. The test won’t affect Carolinas customers unless they originally opened their accounts in one of those states, Wells spokesman Josh Dunn said.

No decision has been made on whether to expand the pilot program, Dunn said. Wells Fargo bought Charlotte’s Wachovia in 2008 and is converting Carolinas bank branches to the Wells name this fall.

North Carolina's economy is recovering, but not at the rate that the state has become accustomed to following previous economic downturns.

That was one of the key points made by John Silvia, chief economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte, during a conference call with reporters today.

Silvia and another Wells Fargo economist, Michael Brown, discussed North Carolina's recent economic performance and the outlook for 2012 and beyond.

"Yes, we have forward momentum, but just not at the pace we're used to and that we've become accustomed to," Silvia said.

Among the problems facing the state is that while economic output is growing, that increased output is not creating the same number of jobs that it has in the past. That is particularly the case in sectors such as manufacturing.

Silvia and Brown looked at the state economy as well as data from the metro areas of Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Asheville.

The Triangle is "improving far faster than any of the other metro areas across the state," Brown said.

Wells Fargo & Co. is eliminating 310 mortgage jobs in the Carolinas as home loan applications slow, the Charlotte Observer's Rick Rothacker reports.

The biggest cut will affect 259 positions at a mortgage application center in Wilmington, a closure that was disclosed in a state regulatory filing last month.

The remaining jobs are in Raleigh and Fort Mill, S.C., bank spokesman Josh Dunn said. The company declined to provide a breakdown on those two locations.

The Triangle's jobless rate continued to show steady improvement in February, suggesting that local employers are slowly resuming hiring.

The unemployment rate for the Raleigh-Durham area fell to 7.6 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January. The data were released today by the N.C. Employment Security Commission and adjusted for seasonal affects by Wells Fargo Securities economists in Charlotte.

The News & Observer uses the seasonally adjusted rates to provide a more accurate comparison to the state and national averages, which also are adjusted.

The local rate remains well below the state and national rates, reflecting this region's concentration of relatively stable industries such as health care, technology and education.