[rbolkey]

It sounded like they verified her speculation:

SMITH: Ashley tried to get another job in banking, but she found that she never made it very far past the initial interviews. She suspected that Wells Fargo had put some sort of black mark on her record somewhere. And it turns out that is exactly the case. Wells Fargo wasn't joking around when they said they would make it hard for her to find work again.

ARNOLD: No. Wells Fargo wrote her up on what's called a U5 document. It's like a report card for bankers basically. We tracked it down, and we asked Ashley to read what it said.

ASHLEY: Failure to perform job duties.

SMITH: Any bank - any bank that Ashley applies to will see this line, failed to do job duties.

ARNOLD: The form does not mention that those job duties were the sales goals that everyone we spoke to said were unrealistic and that are at the center of a series of ongoing investigations at the state and federal level.

SMITH: It just says failed to do job duties. It was the first time Ashley had seen it in print.

ASHLEY: It's like having a black cloud that's kind of looming behind you. And I'm always trying to get in front of the cloud, out of the cloud, into the sunshine, but it's always there.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

[m_mueller]

That's what's so great about Planet Money and Radiolab: They do some actual journalism and try to track down sources. There's only very few outlets left who do that and we should support them as much as possible. In the podcast world these are the only ones coming to mind (along with some spinoffs like More Perfect) - maybe someone here has others. I do listen to others sometimes, like Invisibilia or Freakonomics, but in terms of journalistic merit they don't even come close IMO.