HuffPO-

We may question the need for 17 brands of dishwashing detergent, but giving consumers choices is an excellent check against many types of harmful behavior of companies that make and sell products.

Sell pet food that kills cats and dogs, manufacture a pickup truck with an exploding gas tank, or even try to spin off your popular DVD-by-mail business, and customers will flee.

“This is the classic market response,” said Katherine Porter, a consumer law professor at the University of California. “Consumers vote with their feet.”

But when it comes to buying a home, these market forces are largely neutralized. That’s because debt also has feet. These days home loans, especially loans in default or otherwise in distress, get traded around more often than a mid-career relief pitcher. The lender that makes the loan may sell it to an investor, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or another bank. Sometimes the original lender gets bought out by another bank and the loan is transferred.

For homeowners who remain current on their payments and can avoid financial distress, it rarely matters who owns or services their home loan. But when times get tough, that changes.

[HUFFINGTON POST]

Richard always finds a way to tie this all together, placing the Obama Administration front and center!

HuffPO-

“Investigate the Banks!” Today a coalition of progressive groups handed in a petition with more than 360,000 signatures that demanded exactly that. It calls on the Administration to stop pushing a cushy fraud settlement for bankers, to pursue a fair deal for shafted homeowners, and to let criminal investigations against Wall Street crooks proceed.

Yet White House officials are still aggressively pushing the very same cushy deal on foreclosure fraud that inspired the petition. And just this week the Justice Department declined to prosecute fraudulent bankers once again as it worked to settle another bank fraud case.

Thinking about this relentless pursuit of Wall Street settlements, suddenly the last line of The Great Gatsby — the one about “boats against the current” — came to mind. Bankers are today’s Jay Gatsbys. They’re shady figures who have adopted a veneer of respectability, yet remain relentlessly, ruthlessly, and sometimes illegally self-interested.

[HUFFINGTONPOST]