How Corporate Pardons Create Monopolies

[Passages]

Rocket wants to become the only mortgage company in America. The CFPB found its tactics to be illegal—until Donald Trump let the company off the hook.

by David Dayen
April 2, 2025

The business world thought Donald Trump would usher in a boom, only to get chaos and uncertainty. Businesses don’t like to make big plans when everything can change in an instant. That’s why merger activity in the U.S. has fallen by 18 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite the belief that pent-up dealmaking would soar once Biden’s aggressive antitrust enforcers were sidelined. The relative continuity in antitrust enforcement among Trump officials probably also has something to do with it.

If a company in this environment is pursuing not one but a series of mergers, you have to wonder why they’d risk it. The reward payout must be significant: for example, moving toward a monopoly of the means by which Americans locate, buy, and pay for a home.

Rocket is America’s third-largest mortgage lender, with $1.8 trillion in loans originated. Mr. Cooper is America’s largest mortgage servicer, with seven million borrowers making mortgage payments to it. The former is buying the latter in a $9.4 billion deal.

SNIP
We actually know how Rocket plans to leverage the power resulting from this kind of vertical combination. The details of that ambition were spelled out in a lawsuit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed last December, which accused the company of illegally steering home borrowers to its other mortgage products. But on February 27, the new regime at the CFPB, under the direction of Project 2025 architect Russ Vought, dropped that Rocket case. Just days after that, Rocket’s buying spree began, confident that it can use cross-selling techniques and surveillance tactics to gouge customers and grow profits with relative impunity.

https://prospect.org/power/2025-04-02-how-corporate-pardons-create-monopolies-rocket-mortgage/

Seriously, what else is new? The looting continues.