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Accounts of the crisis have privileged 'high finance' innovations whereas retail banks constantly experimented with how they sell (new) products to consumers. I examine the case of product innovation at a home savings bank in Hungary during the pre-crisis credit boom. Turned from offering state-subsidized long-term savings-and-loans to promoting instant mortgages. Based on ethnographic observations of the bank's Direct Selling Organization, I trace the bank's shift from state-subsidized long-term savings-and-loans to instant mortgages, to problems with demonstrating the qualities of financial products, even ostensibly prudent ones. Drawing on concepts of scientific demonstration and proof, I compare how financial advisors explained the plan to consumers before and after it was combined with mortgages: first they drew the funds by hand, later they adopted software-generated scenarios. I suggest that as sellers perform products interactively with clients, consumers' needs appear. Thus, when organized differently, financial demonstrations yield different consumers-with-preferences. Based on this interactional perspective, I find that consumer finance is an 'economy of qualities' where preferences and product properties stabilize through consultation, and where "social" embedding can enable "economic" calculations. Based on this interactional perspective, I examine US and UK proposals for consumer financial protection.A theater of proof, like the ordinary theater, needs all its accessories. (Latour 1988: 93) Organization 18(2) 215-235

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Existing accounts of failure to predict the financial crisis focus on the complexity of the financial system, and are less useful for understanding crises in non-securitized markets. We examine the roots of optimism leading up to the Eastern European mortgage crisis through the case of Hungary, and use recent theories of expectations, which understand them as both pragmatic and fictional practices that commonly incorporate narratives. Based on archival research and interviews with bankers, regulators and legislators, we demonstrate how the EU convergence narrative was central in forming optimistic expectations. Fusing the underspecified convergence process with an orientalist geographical imaginary, this narrative and its associated measures translated growing indebtedness as 'catching up' with