A handful of other senators sent a letter to the treasury telling him to back off trying to ban private wallets.

Sure you can keep track of treasury note yields to give you indicators but that's really all they are, indicators.

Mortgage rates are driven by The 10 Year Treasury so in order for mortgage rates to go down, we need to see “investors” pull money out of the stock market and put in to the 10 Year.

Currently, a 10 Year Treasury Bond is paying 1.77% and you would receive $8,850 a year on that $500,000. 

The size of the payment is somewhat irrelevant (in my opinion, and assuming you have sufficient cash flow to take care of the property).If you want to get more in depth on the cost/benefit analysis, you could use a program like excel to plan out your cash inflows and outflows, set these against a discount rate (essentially a risk-free rate of return commonly based off of 30-year treasury bonds), and determine the IRR (internal rate of return) that the refinance would yield you.I hope this helps.

The only surplus allowed is with the Treasury at the end of the day. 

If you go back in history of the treasury regs and the UCC, based on a test question in finance, long, long ago, that treasury notes were legal tender to pay all debts public and private and any debt can be settled in cash.

And why prime commercial paper yields more than US Treasury debt.  

A junk bond yielding 10% is higher risk than a US Treasury bond yielding 3%. 

The long-term treasuries are screaming higher rates and inflation being heavily persistent, which usually means underlying house values will go up but I don't think we see that if wages aren't supported in the short term.