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). It also relied on the tragic optimism of the American Dream that informed borrowers that brighter days were always on the horizon for those who work hard and take individualistic control of their lives. It was within this individualistic frame that taking out an extortionate mortgage with a rapidly escalating interest rate could be justified as a form of resistance for the economically marginalized (that is, when the terms of the mortgage were even disclosed by the mortgage sales representative, which was routinely not the case – Taibbi 2010). We are beholden to recognize the savvy motivations that animated people’s engagement with sub-prime finance and not fall prey to the right-wing castigation of our “financial illiteracy” or the canard that people “used their houses as ATMs” for the purchase of “big-screen TVs” and the like.

Obviously, the strategies of financialized “resistance” through finance outlined here, and to which we can today add micro-finance schemes as well, were and are Pyrrhic, if not utterly disastrous. And they stretch the definition of “resistance” almost to the breaking point, given that IMF/WB loans, sub-prime mortgages, consumer credit and the like were actively advertised and encouraged by the powers-that-be. But, as Aihwa Ong (2006) and others have recently pointed out, we do a disservice to people’s agency and intelligence when we imagine neoliberalism is merely imposed from above. It is, in fact, activated from below, enacted and performed by social actors as they contend with and respond to material conditions.