Obama might be the dumbest president we have ever had.

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Tyrannical said:

Final-Fan said:

Uh, that doesn't ... make sense.  Whether right or wrong, if people believed it then according to your logic they would not have been surprised. 

Anyway, the reason is that people didn't wake up one day and "OMG SKY IS FALLING".  It was a relatively gradual process of things getting worse and worse.  At that point it looks at a glance like people knew that the subprime mortgages were a big problem -- perhaps they even recognized that the housing market was collapsing -- but didn't realize that would cause the financial world to implode. 

Bottom line is that your response is simple denial.  Can't you do any better?  If the WSJ was as wrong as you think, surely someone would have said so at the time. 

 I don't know what you find so difficult to comprehend. You have this article from 2007 trying to explain a collapse that didn't even happen until a year later.

At that point in time:

People saw a "housing bubble crisis" coming.

People didn't see a "global financial meltdown" coming.