The naïve Elizabeth Warren–style reaction to this travesty is to enforce bureaucratic simplicity and transparency upon the lenders, perhaps combined with some “consumer education”; but this displays a distressing lack of understanding of the neoliberal mind-set. Banks and other vendors have generations of marketing savvy built into their understanding of the entrepreneurial self, a persona for whom they were instrumental in parturition. They are masters of sales pitches that seem “simple” but in fact are highly manipulative and empty of key information. The nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is only beginning to confront this fact, realizing that the dream of a transparent two-page standardized mortgage agreement is only marginally less prone to manipulation than the balloon-option ARM. If one is serious about countering modern bank practices, then tinkering with legal forms is utterly ineffectual: you have to be willing to muck in and manipulate the entrepreneurial self, as much as or more so than the banks.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 350