The reason for the housing meltdown was the failure of mortgage companies, and the bad loans that were made. Thiose mortgage companies were flying high in 03 and 04. Alan Greenspan didn't see it coming, so to expect NFL owners to is ridiculous.
If you are talking about predictions that the record increases in market values would slow, that is miles, and miles, and miles away from predicting the housing meltdown the mortgage crisis and the economic downturn that followed.
I think it's very important for everyone to understand the driving principles behind the subprime crisis, because although the crisis itself has subsided, the
means and motivation that led to it hasn't changed one bit.
Deregulation had a strong role in the latter stage of the housing crisis bubble. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act was enacted after the Great Depression to separate commercial banks and investment banks, in part to avoid potential conflicts of interest between the lending activities of the former and rating activities of the latter. This is where the MBS's and CDO's come in in the dangerous link between ordinary banking and Wall Street speculation, in the form of credit ratings that allowed those MBS's and CDO's to perpetuate.
A key component of understanding the crisis- is to understand that as the real estate market became the next "hot" thing after the tech bubble burst, the price of property started to rise out of the reach of ordinary buyers, so Wall Street comes up with newfangled financial ingenuity to answer this, such as the mortgage-backed security (MBS) and collateralized debt obligation (CDO), that get assigned "safe ratings." Investors buy those securities under the pretense that they are "safe investments," the mortgage giants are injected with more cash (with which they treat with even more recklessness), through Wall Street, which they loan out to people with questionable assets and credit rating (since they've run out of good people to loan to), that's where the subprime crisis starts. The credit-rating agencies were very complicit in the collapse of the market.
To oversimplify- this is a fancy term for 'leveraging' and 're-leveraging.' Through financial innovation, Wall Street tried to sustain the boom to keep making money off it, but that made the crash even worse as it sucked up more and more money from ordinary investors.
Banks are like ordinary people in that they invest with the money we store in them, with one exception. We are not allowed to invest speculatively to the extent that they do, we are not given the same type of overreaching loans that are given to them on their terms. For us to invest speculatively on the scale that they do, is the equivalent of an ordinary family, betting short on, or taking out a loan on a Gulfstream Jet.
We have actually emerged from the crisis in worse shape than before, and are in position to create even bigger bubbles in the future because none of the de-regulations have been "re-regulated" and the means by which the exorbitant leveraging operate (the "Gulfstream Jet" example here) have not been outlawed, like they were after the Great Depression. Big banks came out even stronger, and smaller banks went under. Those big banks are leveraged even worse than before.
So to get back to the point via the long way- to say the mortgage companies failed is misleading- they were just the middlemen, even partners in crime, who eventually got manipulated by Wall Street "ingenuity." In other words, Wall Street simply jumped on the real estate wagon and rode it into the ground with their "financial ingenuities" which are even more complicated and convoluted than ever.
Just as the next bubble/burst is not going to be because of the specific market that got exploited way beyond its means to sustain, but because of the unchecked
principles behind it.
