With lower expectations, the bubble would not have been so large, and the burst would not have drowned the players and fans so irrepressibly and fatally.
For starters, when U.S. housing prices were rising, the government actively took part in inflating the real estate bubble by pushing rates lower and offering zero-down loans (subprime) to middle to low-income buyers.
Even a relatively small amount of gas a can cause big problems because a gas bubble will expand massively as it moves from high pressure at the seafloor to lower pressure at the surface.
Pipes have now been put in place in Lake Nyos and nearby Lake Monoun to siphon water from the lower layers up to the surface and allow the CO2 at the bottom of the lake to slowly bubble out, preventing a repeat of 1986 tragedy.
Regulators in the United States had total power over subprime lending but as the bubble built, they used that power not to raise down-payments or credit standards, but to lower them.