stanley fisher ran the bank of israel. fisher is considered by many to be a hawk on interest rates which could change the balance of power inside the fed. >> thank you. that's exactly right. if janet yellen is the empress of the do was, professor fisher is the mench of the hawks and this guy is a smart guy who kept inflation down in israel and made the israel currency a stable reliable currency. there will be a hawk. sound money. i'm all for it. let's move on. two months after its disastrous launch secretary sebelius finally call for an investigation into healthercare.gov. nbc news brian mooar joins us with that story. good evening, brian. >> reporter: the secretary expanded on her obama care mea culpa and ordered an inspector general to figure out what went wrong with the roll out of the healthercare.gov website. secretary sebelius said enrollment for the website has gr quadrupled from october november but by the end of the month 365,000 people reached the enrollment finish line. that's a fraction of the millions the admi

he's a brilliant guy, stanley fisher, and he's much more hawkish than janet yellen.s that enough, okay, strong growth, hawk on the fed, is that enough to stop a christmas rally in the stock market? >> it should be, larry. let's look at the criteria that mr. bernanke laid out when he flip-flopped and pulled the rug out. the criteria was, we need better data, data dependent but more importantly he was concerned about washington. despite the fact that we had a 1646 day shutdown and right now it feels like we have every reason to at least initiate that the lights are going to be turned on at this way, long over due dance party. >> you know, i want to get your quick take on the economy because we are seeing some strengthening in numbers. we've seen this before. i want to ask you, too, in relation to what jeff just said, the issue was not just the taper, i think it's the size of the slowdown and the speed of the slowdown of the bond buying. what's your take on all of that? >> people are definitely worried about the taper talk and i think that's what took the markets out th

when stanley fisher becomes the vice president of the board, stanley fisher doesn't like quantitativeg. he's said that publicly. there, too, the fed may be much less dovish than people think. >> well, in a way, they threw janet yellen into the briar patch where she would love to be. i suppose that she's even more dovish than she is and is happy to be committed to a very slow wind-out. i was surprised on stanley fisher. i have a very high regard for him. he's very good. he was a very good governor of the israeli central bank. but putting him in there with janet yellen as a team does seem to create a little bit of a potential friction. i don't know if that was her idea or somebody else's idea. >> i think it's a pretty clefer idea. now, look, this business about buying bonds which adds cash to the financial system, the so-called monetary base, it really hasn't affected the money supply. you've written this on your block. m-2 has been growing and has been growing at 6%, 6.5%, has not had an impact at all. i'm more than happy to see them stop buying all these bonds. i think it's distorting

do you have any views on the implication of stanley fisher -- >> yeah. i think in fixed income overall, whether it's credit or sovereign ded debt, actually, we've been guided by sort of the larger hands of qe. and to that end, actually, the markets are focused on the next stage of this development turns. and i suspect that what might happen is people will focus less perhaps on tapering, clearly front and center on headlines and more on forward guidance. >> that's what the fed would like. but there is -- now this as a fisher comes. >> quite clearly, it caused confusion. largely. but what i want to -- what i think will happen is that unlike in the summer of this year, that first stage process and the management of that process was largely articulated rather poorly. i think that's largely behind us. we're cognizant of the fact that we're still in a world where nominal debt in the sector and in the developed world are very, very high, in a world where inflation really isn't an issue. the idea of sharply higher rates is one that we think we should entertain.

there is some talk that stanley fisher may be -- go back to the fed. do you think that might happen? >> i have no idea. stanley fisher has done a magnificent job in everything he has done. he was enormously influential and effective as the deputy managing director of the i.m.f. and then he has really been a first-rate central banker and an important presence in the international financial community as the governor of the bank of -- >> rose: did he teach a course at m.i.t.? >> he did, indeed. >> rose: it has some influence on you? >> he taught a course which i was a student and which bernanke was a student at just about the same time, that ken rogoff was a student. the olivier blanchard, now the chief economist of the i.m.f.. 14.462 graduate monetary economics. >> rose: why is that numberd? >> it was m.i.t., they gave the courses numbers as much as names. >> rose: what happened in that course that made you decide maybe you would become an economist and then the youngest tenured professor at harvard? >> well, by that time i was already on the way to beco

>> thanks so much. >>> they're being called the fed dream team, the possibility of stanley fisher becoming the next vice chair has economists buzzing. you may not know who mr. fisher is, but steve liesman knows him quite well, has known him for many years when you were working in russia. >> yeah, he was on the imf. >> fetell us what he'd like and what we need to know. >> stan fisher is the guy, when he starts talking to a room of bankers in his very hushed accent, every stops to listen. let's take a look at what we're calling his fed cred here. bank of israel governor, '05 to 2013. citigroup vice chairman from 2002 to '05, imf deputy managing director, eastern europe and the reconstruction there for which, by the way, he took a little criticism with his add vocation by the imf at the time of austerity. world bank chief economist and of course m.i.t. economics professor which is a big part of who he is. take a look here at some of his students. none other than ben bernanke, mario draghi. lawrence summers, one of the eminent economists of our day and gregory mankiw. but that's history. the b

now that stanley fisher is likely to join the fed.re going to find out what our top investors and seema mody think about it, next up on "kudlow." >>> the dow dropped 104 points. the nasdaq and s&p also in the red today. take a look at gold. posting its biggest loss since october. gold tumbled 30 bucks. it's been weak for a long time. so question, is the market throwing a taper tantrum on stronger than expected economic signs and a hawkish stanley fischer joining the federal reserve. here is jim iuorio. so jim, one point i want to make right off the top, retail sales a big number this morning. a very big number. heck, half a percentage point at its core. up 6% in the annual rate for the last three months. that feeds into gdp. what does that tell you? >> no, i definitely think the numbers over the past few weeks have gotten significantly better, particularly out of the labor market. that number today we're hopefully giving excuses with the thanksgiving day holiday. but other than that, the numbers have been pretty good. i do think there

i think she'll keep her foot on the gas a lot longer than bernanke would, and a wrinkle is stanley fishers advice chair is thought to be more hawkish than she is. it's a committee. you're not a dictator. you have to get the con centos of the economy, and where she'll be able to move the committee is an interesting thing it too. we don't know anything about her team leading skills, there are tools at her disposal. i'm skeptical at how effective those are. but she has them. >> what gives you signals about 2014? >> you get the sense that she wants relative policy continuity. bernanke, as pointed out, he has been a very strong advocate in the unemployment time, and i think she'll only go further in that direction. the reluctance of continuing purchase is permeating throughout the federal reserve. those who want to attack the unemployment. they just don't want to seem to want to expand it further. you get the sense that they really want to move back to a world where they know how to operate in. and that's the world of interest rates. with interest rates at zero, is to make promises about the f

>>yeah, a very interesting choice for vice chairman is stanley fisher who is a renowned economist.e is a guy who worked at the world bank, the imf, ran the central bank of israel, and is coming back to the states to be vice chairman here. he has a lot of credentials, a lot of credibility. he's been around very long time and curiously enough he was a professor of ben bernanke when he was in college. >>he probably gave him an 'a' and now it's payback time. >>i would think so. >>let's talk about the impact that the fed's policies have had on the bond markets. you're a bond trader. it's been a terrible year, 2013. >>this summer was a disaster. like i said, we had 100 basis points sell off in the market. that's a big deal because the 10 year went from a 160 to almost 3% so that sounds like 100 basis points but the yield almost doubled. that's a massive percentage change. so the market has experienced a selloff and individual investors fear higher rates. when the think rates might be rising and all this fed chatter and ewspaper stories and changes at the fed is leading people to say i'm

he's stanley fisher, lead the bank of israel. fischer one of the deans of central banking is 70. >>> the great rotation seems to be happening. investors pulled a record amount of money out of bond funds, according to researcher trim tabs, out flows from bond mutual funds so far this year have topped $70 billion, that's the most ever. >>> a lot more people, susie, are flowing into the new health insurance plan. administration says enrollment in private insurance plans through state online marketplaces, and the federal healthcare.gov website did rise sharply in november adding 258 thousand more americans. in the meantime, kathleen sebelius is asking for an investigation into the botched rollout of that federal website. >> today i'm announcing additional steps i've taken. i've asked the inspector general to investigate the development of healthcare.gov including contractor accusation, the overall management of the project and performance and payment of the contractors. >> after two months of patch work and repairs, the affordable ca

. >>> it has been called the fed dream team, janet yellen and stanley fisher as the next fed vice chairmanmists very excited, but who is mr. fisher? we're going to talk about that and also what he might mean for the markets. all of that is straight ahead. >>> plus, no pressure

in terms of you know i think stanley fisher is an outstanding economist and an outstanding policymaker and knows an awful lot about how the world works. i think he would be good at a large number of jobs that he could possibly do. >> i wanted to follow up on the question and i know it's still being implemented and as you said these things are unknowable in advance but i wonder how you were a assessing the success of the white house and aligning incentives for banks and whether the white house would take up financial regulation in the next three years again for any reason? >> this is still a large task of implementing dodd-frank. we have put a lot of the most important pieces in effect in the volcker rule is the most recent of the pieces. one way to measure the success is you have seen the rating agencies talk about or downgrade some of the largest financial institutions and not downgrade them because they think they are risky or unsafe but because they don't think that they are going to be bailed out by the taxpayers if they run into trouble. that was the central feature of dodd-frank

perhaps the bigger headline which is that stanley fisher might turn out to be the vice chair here. are you reading a lot into that? do you worry about what that means if they sort of push the fed away from forward guidance or toward some slightly more hawkish positioning here? >> our perspective is that given the situation with tapering, we're recommending that, you know, there's a shift from some of the higher momentum type of securities that have done so well, stocks that have really performed extraordinarily this year, to higher quality names. names that, perhaps, haven't performed quite as well. as a defensive move in case there is a more hawkish type of a situation going forward. >> sam stovall, get this. i'm going to ask you a fundamental question. through all of this, i mean, we're going to be dealing in a little bit here with some of the high profile fourth quarter earnings. warnings we've been receiving lately. what do you make of that? is this going to be a tough quarter for reports when the time comes. >> historically the fourth quarter is the most volatile quarter. beca

and i'm -- i've got to give some kudos to the stanley fisher thing. >> he's great.ntastic. >> this -- this -- thank you. i don't like everything, but m.i.t. guy, and born in zambia. >> he's fantastic. >> good guy. >> good for vice chairman. >> and one of ben bernanke's mentors too. >> yeah. >> which will give you additional continuity in similar lines of thinking. i get the sense he's a little more hawkish. >> i would argue he has credibility in the wall street community. >> he does. >> to the extent he has relationships on wall street and you need that right-hand person to reach out. >> that's the first thing i thought of. >> really would make it -- that's a great tag team. >> first thing i thought of what becky said, maybe he'll tap the brakes a little. >> yeah. i think he has spoken -- >> what do you think? >> between black friday, cyber monday and green monday, online and traditional retailers look like they're set to score some big gains with consumers this shopping season. our guest host for the next two hours is martin franklin, executive chairman of jarden,

stanley fischer. >> this would be for the number two slot, the vice chairmanship of the fed. stan fisher as been called and economists economist, advisory and teacher to some of the top economists in the world. stint at the second-in-command of the imf we ought to rescue mexico, russia, several asian countries. their economic calamities. he taught at mit for two decades. as economists and central bankers he advocated for aggressive action by central banks in troubled times. the trillions in quantitative easing bond purchases by the fed community has called them dangerous but necessary. >> very hard to reach the conclusions that the unorthodox measures are ineffective. they appeared to be effective. >> fisher has expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the fed's other major policy tool, giving guidance about the future course of interest rates. he said recently, we don't know what we will be doing one year from now. is a mistake to try to get too precise. but one former fed official says that at the fed he would be a loyal dippy and follow her lead on how long to keep it easy %-lo