Hat tip to JD for this this along, from the wsj.com:
Ben Bernanke lives in a three-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot, attached town house near the Capitol. It has an appraised value of roughly $850,000, not far from the $839,000 he paid for it in 2004. A public record search shows he owes $672,000 on the home, after refinancing his mortgage twice.
One refinancing was in late 2009. The other was in late September, shortly after the Fed announced a new program, known as “Operation Twist,” which aimed to drive down long-term interest rates.
Mr. Bernanke holds a 30-year mortgage. He was required to send proof of employment, including pay stubs, before the bank approved the loan, according to a person familiar with the matter.
After a decade in Washington, Mr. Bernanke doesn’t seem to have been swept up by the nation’s capital.
He occasionally shoots baskets in the Fed’s dreary, underground gym. The closest he came to showing a wild side was when he was a professor at Princeton: He bought a Chrysler Sebring convertible, according to someone who knows him.
On most nights he’s home with his wife, Anna, reading on his Kindle after dinner, say people who know him. In the past 18 months, he has told others, he has read 200 books on the Kindle.
Lately he’s read about pre-World War II Germany, “In the Garden of the Beast,” and a room-by-room guide to a 19th-century British home, Bill Bryson’s “At Home.”
He doesn’t read books about the financial crisis. When asked in September if he had seen a recent HBO movie about it, he said he hadn’t: “I saw the original.”
For more click here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204336104577094700478530784.html
Bernanke is a joke. The only real (ie. not academic or government) job he’s ever had is waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant in the summer between high school and college.
He believes that it’s the feds responsibility to increase the money supply (inflation) whenever there is a threat of deflation. What this does is boost the price of assets. People that own those assets do well. People that are on a fixed income, wage, or salary get screwed because the money you make buys less because everything costs more.
Basically Ben steals from everyone that transacts using the dollar to keep the people that he represents (banks) from losing money.
Just read In the Garden of the Beast. An insightful history of Germany as Hitler was coming up in the 1930’s from the perspective of the American ambassador’s family in Berlin. I recommend it. Available at your local library…or, I guess, on Kindle.
AAAAh yes Shadash, quite correct. Buy property or other hard assets now (preferably with a fixed interest long term loan) and wait for the coming inflation to make your mortgage payments a joke. The dollars have been printed and they ARE going to come home to roost! Ask your parents how this worked, they have already lived through Kennedy and Nixon’s version of this particular event.
That was interesting, JtR. Thanks for posting that info. Kinda neat to get a glimpse into Ben’s life…
Please don’t take it personally, shadash, but I’m glad that Bernanke is the Fed’s chairman, rather than, say, Jurgen Stark, Andrew Mellon or, indeed, you. I’m aware that your opinion is quite widespread (shared by all GOP candidates except Romney, pretty much all present day German politicians, or 1929 US politicians). It also happens to be wrong.