I saw it coming too

Yeah, I started to see it in about the mid-2000s. And I'm just an average person. If I could see it, you'd think certainly people in power could see it coming.

I saw it in 2003 and I was only 24 years old then. Of course it helped that I lived in Las Vegas at the time (epicenter of the pandemonium). I still remember Googling "Is there such thing as a housing bubble?" and hardly anything came up at that time as such a thing had never really happened before. But what I was seeing go on around me was not normal. Just like in this movie, I had coworkers buying up multiple properties--some of them sight-unseen--using liar loans with the sole intention of flipping them to someone else at a higher price (who in turn was hoping to do the same to a yet greater fool). I saw housing lotteries which I knew was not normal. In ONE year house prices in Las Vegas shot up 50% which I knew was not sustainable. I heard all the bullshit lines from realtors like "Everybody wants to live here!" and "We're running out of land!" and "Real estate never goes down!" and "Buy now or be priced out forever!" Honestly I know of realtors in Las Vegas who should've been criminally prosecuted for some of the bullshit they were spouting to potential buyers in order to make sales.

Then in 2005 I moved to San Diego where it was more of the same. Properties so overpriced that I would literally BELLY LAUGH. $600k shacks with homeless people pushing shopping carts in the street out front. I actually saw that one time at an open house I attended with a realtor friend of mine! I just laughed and said, "Anyone who has the income to afford a $600k house would NOT live here." I would get into arguments with friends and strangers alike who did not want to hear my words of warning. They thought I was batshit crazy. Of course almost all of them were vested in the bubble so they simply didn't want to hear it. But unlike the one guy in this movie, I do say "I told you so!" whenever I get the chance. I warned them and they chose not to listen.

In 2008, shortly before the crash, I moved back to Las Vegas. I watched the entire thing implode and it was almost like a giant bomb went off in the city. Vegas became totally unrecognizable from the boomtown I'd moved to in 2003. Traffic on the strip totally disappeared (which was nice, actually--I could zip to and from work with ease!) Entire shopping centers--including grocery stores--started going out of business everywhere. I'd never seen grocery stores go out of business before. Half-built casinos, tract developments and condo projects were frozen in time, their construction all completely halted. People were losing or simply walking away from their properties left and right, it was almost normal. The had music stopped and there were no longer any greater fools.

Where I went wrong, unfortunately, was not finding a way to profit off of the bust. I'd considered shorting the banks but never actually got around to doing it. And while I knew housing was in for a major haircut, I wasn't sure how (or even if) the coming housing collapse was going to bleed over into the stock market. With the benefit of hindsight we all know the answer to that question now.

Anyway, Alan Greenspan should be in prison IMO! And as long as interest rates are being held artificially low, housing prices will remain artificially high.