In the United States, there were 401(k) retirement accounts and an endless variety of other ways of encouraging ordinary citizens to play the market but at the same time, encouraging them to borrow. One of the guiding principles of Thatcherism and Reaganism alike was that economic reforms would never gain widespread support unless ordinary working people could at least aspire to owning their own homes; to this was added, by the 1990s and 2000s, endless mortgage-refinancing schemes that treated houses, whose value it was assumed would only rise, “like ATMs,”—as the popular catchphrase had
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