Mind Over Market

Wells Fargo's ceo Dick Kovacevich talks about the causes of the financial crisis on CNBC's Squawk Box, September 12, 2012 The following transcript has not been checked for accuracy. right now, though, more from our guest host today, dick kovacevich who is the former chairman and ceo of wells fargo. when we were talking a little bit ago, you were talking about how the financial crisis was caused, in your view, this was eight banks, 12 s & loans, citi, you could go back to those and go to the heads of those at that time. you think there were real problems happening. yeah, 11 and 12 s & ls, and one commercial bank, the rest were commercial banks. i think it was greed. they had to know that this stuff was not good. we went from -- there's always been subprime mortgages. we went from about 10% of the mortgage market to at the peak to 50% of the mortgage market being subprime lending. and this is no doc, low doc stated income, an open invitation for frau...

Rough Transcript: Andrew Ross Sorkin: Ikay, let's talk about dick kovacevich. comments made on this show is still rocking the financial industry, sandy weill's change of heart on financial super markets like the ones he created. take a listen to this for a second. Clip of Sandy Weill: what we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans and have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not going to be too big to fail. the banking system is really very, very important. i think that the problem that was created was created by too much concentration in investments in the banking system, way too much leverage, very little transparentally with lots of off-balance sheath things that didn't really count and i think a lot of those things have to change. i think that there should be transparency and nothing off the b...

Mary Thompson of CNBC interviews Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who discusses lending policies to small business.