Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is having a tough time refinancing his home loan.
“I recently tried to refinance my mortgage and I was unsuccessful in doing so,” the 60-year-old top economist said Thursday at a conference in Chicago.
Bernanke said he was not joking, adding that home lenders “may have gone a little bit too far on mortgage credit conditions,” according to a report from Bloomberg.
It’s not clear why Bernanke, who refinanced his Washington home twice before while serving as the chairman of the Fed, would be denied a new loan. As head of the central bank, he earned roughly $200,000 a year. He now is a fellow with the Brookings Institution and is working on a book on his time managing the central bank during the financial crisis.
But Bernanke has previously warned that lenders have set their credit requirements too strictly in the wake of the housing crash. In a 2012 speech he said that “it seems likely at this point that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and that overly tight lending standards may now be preventing creditworthy borrowers from buying homes, thereby slowing the revival in housing and impeding the economic recovery.”
His successor at the Fed, Janet Yellen, has made a similar argument, saying in June that “it is difficult for any homeowner who doesn’t have pristine credit these days to get a mortgage,” and that the demanding standards for getting a mortgages is “one of the factors that is causing the housing recovery to be slow.”
President Obama also called for easier terms for mortgages earlier Thursday. “If we make it easier for first-time homebuyers to get a loan, we won’t just create even more construction jobs and speed up the housing recovery. We’ll speed up your efforts to grow a nest egg, start a new company, and send your own kids to college or graduate school someday,” the president said, according to text prepared for his speech in Chicago.
