Time Mag’s Person of the Year
The Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke was named today as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
Time describes him as “not… a typical Beltway power broker. He’s shy. He doesn’t do the D.C. dinner-party circuit; he prefers to eat at home with his wife, who still makes him do the dishes and take out the trash. Then they do crosswords or read. Because Ben Bernanke is a nerd.”
The main reason Big Ben was chosen is “that he is the most important player guiding the world’s most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.”
Which brings us to today’s rates
As most predicted, the Federal Reserve today said they would leave its short-term interest rate at around 0%. This is the final meeting of the year and in a statement from the Federal Reserve Board, the rate was kept low primarily because “the housing sector has shown some signs of improvement over recent months. Household spending appears to be expanding at a moderate rate, though it remains constrained by a weak labor market, modest income growth, lower housing wealth and tight credit.”
HURRY UP and follow Bernanke’s cues?
In the insanely long extended Time Magazine interview with Bernanke, he revealed that he refinanced his own home this year at 5% and switched from a floating rate which Bernanke said “exploded” in cost, to a 30-year fixed.
On top of that, the Mortgage Banker’s Association announced today that mortgage rates rose for the second week in a row from 4.88% to 4.92%, so historically low mortgage rates may be inching a little higher, so should we all take Bernanke’s cue and refi?
