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🪵 The Threshold

Sub-prime lending exploited the American Dream myth to sell mobility to marginalized borrowers

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, seed, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@haiven_cultures_2014, loc. 528

3 min read

Sub-prime lending exploited the American Dream myth to sell mobility to marginalized borrowers

Evidence

For our purposes, it should be noted that the entire sub-prime market was based on offering NINJA borrowers a chance for privatized upward class mobility through the lure of home ownership. One way of reading this situation is to suggest that low-income workers accepted the loans as a form of resistance to their material conditions. Indeed, many did so because, even if their homes were foreclosed, things could not get much worse: they already, after all, had virtually no assets to lose. Sub-prime loans depended to a large extent on the myth of the universality of the middle class and the idea of financialized independence; sub-prime mortgages offered borrowers what seemed to be a key to economic security, health, education and a fair share of social wealth (Aronowitz 2003; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 112-117). This, especially for the largely racialized urban populations that were the prime target of this form of extortion, might be read as a form of resistance to a neoliberal culture of utter abandonment and the vaporization of social security and public space (see Giroux 2012). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 528

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Introduces and explains the NINJA borrower category as central to understanding the sub-prime market’s social function.
  • XREF: The ‘resistance through finance’ framing connects directly to deWaard’s argument that financialization colonizes imagination and everyday life — borrowing as internalized ideology rather than imposed structure. — connects to: Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154; Finance colonizes global South elites and American urban poor via intermediaries — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 153; Predatory lending has thrived on hope as much as on poverty for centuries — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 195 (+6 more)
  • SEED: Article angle: how the American Dream functioned as marketing infrastructure for predatory lending — the narrative as debt-hook.

Broader Connections

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