The final report of the National Commission on the causes of the financial and economic crisis in the United States »blames predatory lending for the large build-up of subprime and other high risk mortgages in the financial system.«

Financial institutions are accused of having seduced people into buying houses and other consumer goods that they patently could not afford. In other words: the most preposterous consumer loans were financed. But what is actually more preposterous? Granting consumer loans to people who don't have the funds so they can fulfil their wish of buying their own home, or, once the houses are built, expel people because they can't pay their loans, leaving the houses empty or even tearing them down? In all the excitement about the global financial capital the fact that in the richest industrial nations in the world the majority of the population can't afford to buy a house out of their lifelong earnings but rather have to spend a portion of their monthly income on rental payments to the minority of home owners has gone unchallenged. In capitalism, existing means of production and personal needs are ultimately not a sensible reason for building houses. People who work for others for little money and who will possibly no longer be needed in their businesses in the foreseeable future are regarded in capitalism as »subprime«. Giving these people, who form the majority of the population, a share in the available wealth, endangers the functioning of the market and potentially can even lead to a capitalistic crisis, in which millions of families are expelled from their homes and swell the ranks of the homeless. Thrown out of their homes, maybe they then go on to build houses with their children out of cardboard and rubbish. On the edges of towns in which their empty homes are under foreclosure and cannot find a buyer.