What a strange world we are living in when Ben Bernanke holds a press conference to say that he’s essentially going to do nothing, and the markets go down 200 points. That was the story last night after the Fed announced it would hold steady on quantitative easing for at least the next several months, watching and waiting to make sure the U.S. economy really is strong enough for the central bank to pull back from the $85 billion money dump it’s been doing every month. This “tapering” is different from interest rate tightening, which probably won’t happen before 2015. Yet mortgage rates have gone up, too, because of ... (full story)