It's actually substantially different. Most importantly, it's much hard to paper over shoddy lending practices with credit cards. If you give a subprime borrow

It's actually substantially different. Most importantly, it's much hard to paper over shoddy lending practices with credit cards. If you give a subprime borrower a mortgage and the market continues to go up, they can pay it back with the gains from selling the house. On paper, it looks like everybody won. With credit cards however, the owner eventually does have to pay the debt back. If you're too loose with handing out credit cards, it's easy to end up with a bunch of people defaulting. Plus, the scales are an order of magnitude different. Moreover, credit card debt isn't tied to the rest of the economy as heavily as mortgages are.