Just in case the general population was getting accustomed to the image of a demonic creature from the depths of hell every time the name "Chairsatan" was invoked in impolite conversation, here comes Jon Hilsenrath via the WSJ's blog, to attempt to humanize the man who together with 9 other academics who have no real world experience, runs the world out of a private (and locked) conference room in the Marriner Eccles building. So lest someone expect pentagrams to accompany today's FOMC statement, coupled with Bernanke breathing fire and smelling of sulfur at the next Fed conference, here is WSJ's Jon to put a humanly halo around the printer operator himself...
From the WSJ Blog:
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.
As to what he is reading now...
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."
Oddly convenient reading that one would say. We can only hope Benny and the Inkjets do not want to see if they have change history this time around by recreating the identical conditions.