Do you have a pension? A lot of us do, and a lot of them are just specifically structured investment schemes with some tax incentives, which means they're a seventy year bet that the stock market will "always go up". Historically, that's been broadly true, given decent time scales - just as it was with house prices.
I suppose it would be logically consistent to then say that people with pensions are "asking for it", too, but you get to a certain point where we cannot blame the layman for not looking at a field where all the experts are saying the same thing and not believing them.
In financial markets, the idea that "prices will always go up" is not just reasonable, but one of the founding principles of our economy. Everything must grow, all of the time. If prices _aren't_ going up, then something is wrong, and if prices are going _down_ we call it a recession, give it a grand name with capital letters, and try to make it not happen again.
in the context of an investment strategy, it is reasonable to assume that the overall market will always eventually rebound after a crash. it might not sometime in the future, but if the entire world market collapses and never recovers, we have bigger problems on our hands than asset allocation for retirement.
that said, there's really no reason to assume that a specific type of asset will continue to appreciate indefinitely, even if it has done so for a very long time.
but we're not even talking about betting hard on a particular asset class. we are talking about massively levered loans whose viability depends on the value of a single building. literally zero diversification. I honestly don't know how anyone could see this as anything but wishful thinking.
