Another 30,074 homes here, or 4.4 percent, are close to falling into the same situation even as 30-year mortgage rates hover at historic lows, below 4.5 percent. Almost half of all Tampa Bay area residential properties with a mortgage - that's 319,367 homes - had a mortgage bigger than the home's value in this year's second quarter. Treasury bond bubble in the making.Īnd just when you thought it was safe to talk about a bottom in the Florida housing market, new real estate numbers show weak sales and still declining prices. Recent reports suggest high-speed traders with powerful computers may be fleecing the stock markets and fueling stock volatility just to make a buck at our expense.įleeing stocks - and many folks are doing exactly that based on the flow of assets out of mutual funds lately - means smaller investors are piling lemming-like into government bonds as experts start to warn of a U.S.
The Dow, which briefly fell back under 10,000 last week, is full of nasty chatter of a serious market drop ahead while apocalyptic-sounding (and only occasionally accurate) signals with names like "Doomsday investing" or the "Hindenburg Omen" are in the news anticipating a sharp downturn. "Investors," says Clearwater veteran financial planner Ray Ferrara, "are embracing the Will Rogers saying of 'not being concerned about the return on my money as much as the return of my money.'" These are the days that can test the faith in capitalism. "Risk" - a foundation premise in our economy - for now has morphed into an obscene four-letter word as people more than ever go out of their way to eliminate as much of it as they can. Suddenly, it seems, we've nose-dived into one of those financial convergences when nothing's going right with your money.