Bradley Linskens, the former top examiner of Wells Fargo at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, sued the agency Tuesday over records requests he had made related to his removal earlier this year.

In March 1998, American Banker reported plans by Norwest Corp. to establish sales quotas and step up cross-selling. Three months later, the Minneapolis bank announced a merger with Wells Fargo.

Consumer debt breaks the previous mark set back in 2008, but some are worried that people are returning to their profligate ways; Wells Fargo makes greater use of consumer surveys to fix its brand.

Both sides of Wells Fargo's $142 million settlement over its fake-accounts scandal made last-ditch efforts to salvage the class-action pact after a federal judge voiced misgivings about some of its terms.

The city joins a growing list of municipalities that have filed similar lawsuits, just two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities have standing to sue lenders under the Fair Housing Act.

Wells Fargo may have opened as many as 3.5 million fraudulent accounts in the last 15 years, according to consumers who are trying to beef up a settlement with the bank over abusive sales practices.

Executives at the embattled bank made clear Thursday that they are not discarding its long-standing strategy of selling additional products to existing customers.

Wells said slowing loan growth had hurt its aggressive efforts to lower its efficiency ratio, so it is doubling the expenses it aims to cut by 2019.

The good news: SBA lending is going gangbusters and business owners are optimistic about growth prospects and their ability to access credit. The not-so-good news: Many firms are still not particularly interested in borrowing and startups are not the engines of job creation they once were.

Through the bank’s new API, small-business customers can feed their bank data into Xero’s cloud accounting technology.