The ideal entrepreneurial-agent construct erases the very concept of predatory lending
Evidence
The makeover of the worker/consumer into daredevil risk-taker turns out to be central to the neoliberal blanket absolution of the financial sector for causing the crisis. In this construct, there can be no such thing as “predatory lending,” since any economic transaction, no matter how studded with booby traps, is freely entered into by the ideal entrepreneurial agent, and therefore is prima facie noncoercive or free of exploitation. Since all those “subprime” and “alt-A” mortgages were merely shiny products responding to the desires of all those income-challenged potential home owners (not inconsequentially overrepresented by marginal borrowers from disadvantaged racial and demographic groups), the buck stops with the latter. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 347
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explains how the concept of ‘predatory lending’ is structurally impossible within the neoliberal theoretical frame of the entrepreneurial self.
- SEED: Article angle: how a single theoretical assumption (the entrepreneurial agent) functionally immunizes an entire industry from legal concepts of predation.
- XREF: connects to: Exploding mortgage-security demand forced lenders to invent worthless borrowers. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 94; Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154; Blaming borrowers’ financial ignorance obscures the structural logic of sub-prime lending — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 528 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Government-backed loan guarantees without oversight enabled predatory lending
#contradicts(0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1487 - The ideal neoliberal subject is a self-sufficient entrepreneurial risk-taker
#expands(0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 36 - Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities
#expands(0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90