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e are both demand and supply-side factors that explain the emergence of subprime loans to previously excluded groups. At one level, the transformation of banking in the 1980s from earnings based on interest margins to net earnings based on fees for financial services made it lucrative for banks to extend loans to racial minorities and single-female headed households at conditions far more exploitative than mortgage loans to middle-class recipients. Yet, it is not enough to simply assume that transformations in financial markets translate into widespread social change. In the case of subprime lending, the longstanding political consensus on the centrality of homeownership to American society legitimized the rhetoric of fostering an ‘asset-owning democracy’. The underbelly of the homeownership society is the inability of the housing system to provide adequate and affordable dwellings for large numbers of Americans. Government policy massively promoted home buying by low-income households despite that many families could not afford them. Admittedly, rising indebtedness is a problem faced by many families. We argue that the causes of indebtedness are similar for the majority of middle- and low-income families: the longer term trends of slow wage growth and the politics of abandonment combined with the more recent processes of financialization. But, since the majority of single-mothers, and especially racial minorities, do not belong to the ownership society, they are affected by these processes differently and more severely. Firstly, women of all races as ‘workers’ are subject to the persistent gender wage-gap and make up the majority of the part-time and flexible workforce. Secondly, neo-liberalism has fundamentally changed the dynamics of social reproduction which affects single-women and minorities most acutely. Single-mothers are solely responsible for meeting the economic and social needs of their families, which creates specific forms of inequality. At the same time, women also seem to bear the brunt of budget consolidation and financial retrenchment following severe financial crisis. As the present subprime crisis in the United States has shown, financial governance plays a crucial role in how risk sharing is organized in society. Low-income women were integrated into the asset-regime, but at the cost of mounting debts levels and crippling costs to service these debts. As such, homeownership has brought greater financial insecurity as higher debts mean low-income women own a lesser share of their homes - (dis)accumulation of wealth - than at any previous times. 1 In fact, Dymski makes the argument that the US subprime crisis was the result of the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage markets. Racial minorities gained increasingly access to housing credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers, a process he describes as ‘from redlining to predatory lending ‘(2009: 162). 2 At a US Senate Committee Hearing on Health, Education, Labour and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Edward Kennedy, April 18, 2008, evidence was cited that 32% of women in comparison to 24.2 of men received subprime mortgages. Also women are found more often in the high-cost subprime market. More than one in ten (10.9 percent) compared to one in thirteen (7.7 %) for men. 3 Both the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 extended the anti-discrimination norms of the civil rights law to housing and