Wages have stagnated for 40 years and everything else is getting more expensive, what are people supposed to do? If wages had have continued growing with productivity as they should have, would we have had the middle class looking for fast cash in the stock market in the 90s? Or in the housing market of the 2000s?
To be fair, most of the middle class didn't enter the bubble housing market looking for "fast cash". They were looking for a place to live. Being middle class generally means only owning one house.
