Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank’s efforts to spur economic growth are being blunted by impediments to mortgage lending, and he called for further steps to heal the housing market.

“We have helped lower mortgage rates to the lowest point in many, many decades,” Bernanke told homebuilders today in Orlando, Florida. “Yet we are not seeing as much activity as we would like to see.”

Bernanke, who repeated that the pace of the recovery has been “frustratingly slow,” didn’t discuss the outlook for monetary policy. He devoted part of his speech to recommendations from a Fed study on housing that was sent to Congress last month and which prompted criticism from some lawmakers, who said the Fed has overstepped its authority.

“The state of housing and mortgage markets may also be holding back the recovery of our financial system and the normalization of credit conditions,” Bernanke said on Sunday to the National Association of Homebuilders International Builders’ Show.

Referring to the high standards of lenders following the housing bust, Bernanke said “some tightening was no doubt necessary.”

“That being said, the pendulum has probably swung too far in the other direction by this time,” he said. “Conditions are still too tight for the health of both the financial system, for the construction industry and for our economy.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 0.9 percent to 1,339.40 at 1:52 p.m. in New York as a plan to help Greece avoid default appeared to unravel and US consumer confidence trailed estimates. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 1.96 percent from 2.04 percent late yesterday.

Record-low mortgage rates haven’t revived housing sales. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 3.87 percent as of February 9, according to a Freddie Mac index, the lowest in data going back 40 years.

Buyers purchased new homes at an annual pace of 307,000 in December. The figure is little improved from the 278,000 pace in August 2010, the least new home sales since at least 1963, according to the Census Bureau.

Bernanke said housing has been recovering slowly because “many lending institutions have tightened underwriting conditions dramatically, relative to the pre-recession period.”

“Current lending practices appear to reflect, in part, obstacles that are limiting or preventing lending even to creditworthy households,” he said.

(Bloomberg)