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 …, loc. 347