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FICO and the Credit Bureau Cartel

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 da y 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. 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.

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