on in its home loan business as revenue fell and expenses rose. The foreclosure mess that began in the fourth quarter of 2010, with borrowers accusing major banks of repossessing homes without having the right paperwork in place, was a key source of higher costs in the quarter. The bank also announced a new chief financial officer. The first-quarter results give some inkling of why the Federal Reserve told the bank in March to rein in its plans to boost dividends, even as competitors were authorized to hike their payouts. "Bank of America is further behind. And the reason they're further behind is because of what's going ont was still suffering from high mortgage losses. The bank's book of consumer loans shrank by 10 percent in the quarter, and loans to companies did not rise enough to offset that. But the results were good enough to lift JPMorgan shares 1.2 percent in premarket trading. JPMorgan is the first of the big banks to post quarterly results, and its earnings often give investors a hint of what to expect from other financial companies. "These were good numbers. They beat estimates, but not massively. I think the financial sector generally is holding up but is not performing quite as well as we would like to see," said Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank in Lo reason for a company like Ticketmaster to even exist. The ability now exists for venues and promoters to sell tickets directly to customers online, thus eliminating the need for a middle man, especially a middle man who charges you an additional fee simply to use your own printer! But instead of fading into history like other painful relics of the pre-internet age, (*69 remember that?), Ticketmaster recently aligned with Live Nation in a deal that forces concert-goers to pay ridiculous surcharges (which continue to go up, in spite of the fact that the ticket-selling business now requires less overhead). Take This Remote And Shove It Comcast is the reigning Worst Company champ, and anyone that has ever spent an entire day waiting for a service tech to come, only to hear that familiar false refrain, "they came by and no one was home," probably isn't surprised. But what really rankles most Comcast customers is that they have few-to-no options once they've finally had enough. Unlike the cellphone business where you can always say "I'm switching to XYZ," (at least until AT&T figures out how to buy itself, too, and the world turns inside-out) cable service is often a regional monopoly. So when there's a problem -- and there's always a problem -- you're stuck taking another day off to wait for the cable guy to not show up. Meanwhile Comcast doesn't care, because you're probably not going slap a satellite dish on your roof, or heaven forbid, watch NBC on an antenna. Bank Of Everywhere When Bank of America swooped in to purchase a collapsed Countrywide in 2008, it probably thought it was getting a sweet deal. Instead, it bought $4 billion in bad PR and questionable mortgages. Now its customers -- many of whom didn't know they even had Countrywide mortgages at the time that company imploded -- are trapped in BofA's nightmare. The bank has repeatedly attempted to foreclose on properties that don't even have a mortgage, let alone one with BofA. Then there are the Kafkaesque feelings of utter helplessness, because while you certainly don't require concert tickets or cable TV, shelter remains a basic necessity. For many people who've woken up to find they have a BofA mortgage, it's like being adopted by abusive parents when you're already an adult, and you won't be emancipated for another 20 to 30 years. The Dark Oily Horse So, having gone through all this, wh