Mortgage lenders face destruction as a cartel of Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax work with FICO to drive them out of business. Regulator and anti-monopolist Rohit Chopra is pushing back.
So it was a weird day last month when Chopra had a room full of mortgage bankers nodding their heads in furious agreement, and even angry at their own trade association for helping a monopoly take advantage of them.
While mortgage lending can be done by the big guys, real estate is an inherently localized industry with a clubby network of realtors, title insurers, and various other specialists in the home-buying process, so independent players have a strong foothold.
In 1970, the only woman on the Banking Committee, Leonor Sullivan, collaborated with Rep. Wright Patman and Senator William Proxmire to write and pass the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Though they lost that suit in 2010, they continued litigation and political attacks, including hiring the Progressive Policy Institute in 2017 to write a pseudo-academic paper supporting their monopoly to fool policymakers.
(As an aside, if you want to act on this problem, the CFPB recently opened a public comment docket for people to weigh in on what to do about these junk fees and asked the mortgage industry to add their thoughts.
It’s not a coincidence that the people most sympathetic to the problems facing mortgage bankers is Rohit Chopra, an anti-monopolist consumer protection regulator, and Josh Hawley, a populist Senator.
The original article contains 4,455 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 95%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
So it was a weird day last month when Chopra had a room full of mortgage bankers nodding their heads in furious agreement, and even angry at their own trade association for helping a monopoly take advantage of them.
While mortgage lending can be done by the big guys, real estate is an inherently localized industry with a clubby network of realtors, title insurers, and various other specialists in the home-buying process, so independent players have a strong foothold.
In 1970, the only woman on the Banking Committee, Leonor Sullivan, collaborated with Rep. Wright Patman and Senator William Proxmire to write and pass the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Though they lost that suit in 2010, they continued litigation and political attacks, including hiring the Progressive Policy Institute in 2017 to write a pseudo-academic paper supporting their monopoly to fool policymakers.
(As an aside, if you want to act on this problem, the CFPB recently opened a public comment docket for people to weigh in on what to do about these junk fees and asked the mortgage industry to add their thoughts.
It’s not a coincidence that the people most sympathetic to the problems facing mortgage bankers is Rohit Chopra, an anti-monopolist consumer protection regulator, and Josh Hawley, a populist Senator.
The original article contains 4,455 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 95%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!