Ask the editors: Will your mortgage rate stay low until the economy recovers?

The short answer:  probably.  The long answer:  your ARM depends not on the state of the economy, per se, but on the index that the bank uses to set your rate--like the Londong Interbank Overnight Rate (LIBOR), regional Cost of Funds Index (COFI), or various indices based on the current yield of US Treasuries.

Those rates tend to stay low during modern recessions, as this chart shows:

But that's not a law of nature; it's the fact that the central bank tends to respond to respond to crises by flooding the system with liquidity.  Both the COFI and the LIBOR spiked during the crisis last fall, even as treasury yields plummeted to near zero.

With interest rates at historical lows, central banks are running out of room to expand the money supply through traditional channels.  If there's another liquidity crisis, the LIBOR and the COFI could spike up again, and anyone whose rate resets during that period might not like the results.

That said, the Fed and the Bank of England are working overtime to pump liquidity into the economy through any means necessary, so it still seems more likely than not that ARM rates will stay low for the duration.