Flutterby™! : Higher interest rates

High rates stress Bay Area:

Bagnell also saw his ARMs take off. After being laid off from the software industry in 2000, he went into real-estate investment and now owns two five-unit apartment buildings in Oakland, both with adjustable-rate mortgages. Over the past few years, vacancy rates have been high, so he has not implemented any rate increases because he wants to keep his tenants.

But now his interest rates have gone up two percentage points since July 2005. The mortgage on each building is about $500 more per month.

I hope hope hope (but I'm sure it's fruitless) that when all the schmucks who ran up real estate with their speculation without thinking about reasonable ways to hedge their risk don't manage to screw over us taxpayers by making us bail them out when they start to go bankrupt wholesale. Unfortunately, I anticipate lots of stories of hard luck families squeezed out of "their" homes manipulated by the real estate industry in such a way that the federal government (ie: those of us who were a little more risk averse) end up propping up the bubble.