There were a lot of us watching the signs in 2005 or so. There were a lot of us who didn't miss it. And it wasn't "crackpot conspiracy theory" types; it was normal people looking to buy a home and wondering why median prices in our area climbed from 3x to 5x median income within a few years, when the 3x figure had been pretty steady since WWII. A little bit of research showed that a lot of houses had been bought on unusual terms -- no-doc loans, very little down, adjustable rates, and so on. For those of us who expect to buy a home with 20% down, a 15-30 year mortgage, and payments less than 38% of take-home income, it seemed very strange that banks were lending people money on considerably looser terms. Easy money leading to a sharp climb in prices, combined with a big increase in speculators/flippers, should have been a tipoff that we were looking at a bubble market.
There's no excuse for "experts" like Greenspan to have missed it, when the everyday people running websites like seattlebubble.com saw it coming.
You are absolutely right. If you look at most housing forums on the internet, for example most people looking to buy housing were absolutely certain there was a bubble going on. They just knew that (i) ordinary people in their neighbourhood could not afford the houses in their neighbourhood and (ii) there were no rich people coming in buying those houses either so something had to give.
There's no excuse for "experts" like Greenspan to have missed it, when the everyday people running websites like seattlebubble.com saw it coming.