Perhaps you casually glanced at the article last week buried on the 3rd page of the business section, or 3/4 the way down the Google News page stating that Met Life was exiting the mortgage business. Met Life, the large life insurance company with Snoopy as their company mascot, was the nation's 10th largest mortgage lender, acquiring most of their loans through the "correspondent" channel, meaning they purchased closed loans from banks in the secondary market.

So the casual reader noted Met Life's decision, yawned, and moved on to college basketball scores or the latest Kerdashian drama. Maybe on the same newspaper page was an ad from a local lender advertising record low 15 or 30 year mortgage rates. So what if a bank exits the business? But for industry insiders, it is another troubling sign of the times. With Bank of America's exit last year, that's a tremendous amount of capacity that just left our industry. And it leaves us asking the question, who or what is next?

Imagine you are director at a large bank. You have to be asking yourself "why are we in the mortgage business?" Gone are the days when a bank could reasonably predict things like the value of its future servicing rights, the pace of new regulations, whether or not home mortgage interest will continue to be deductible, how much (little) litigation their mortgage operation would draw, and the public's perception of their business.

For those of us without the option of exiting the business, the signs from Washington are more of the same. There are those that would like to abolish Fannie and Freddie, without which there would be no 2012 American mortgage market. While there is still a Fannie and a Freddie, Congress is willing to use them as a piggy bank by raising their Guaranty fee (the loan fees they charge to lenders) to pay for the payroll tax break extension. And with the FHFA finally getting a director, one can only imagine the pace of new regulations won't slow down.

To the typical, overworked, stressed out American homeowner or potential homeowner, the news coming from our industry may just be white noise. But mortgage loans are the fuel that feeds the housing market and to some degree the American economy. Here's hoping that this fuel doesn't become a vanishing commodity.