Andrew Huszar about quantitative easing

There's a real question as to whether the massive bond-buying program known as quantitative easing was worth the cost, former Federal Reserve official Andrew Huszar said Tuesday.
"My argument is not that QE was not at all useful," he said on CNBC's "Fast Money."
"I believe that at the time, it was just one more tool that the Fed introduced to try to help the economy," he said. "My point, ultimately, is the idea that very quickly into QE, it started becoming obvious that it wasn't working in the way that it was supposed to."
Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, noted a few of the program's unintended effects.
(Read more: Hide from Fed taper with 3 stocks: Ron Sloan)

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"I think the real issue is that the Fed has expanded its tool kit so dramatically, and really there are some real questions as to how potentially it unwinds, when it unwinds," he said. "We saw this past summer there was this announcement of potentially a taper and the markets actually tanked, and after that the Fed backpedaled. What's going to happen if we go on for months, years longer?"
Huszar apologized for his role in QE in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Monday.
(Read more: O'Shaughnessy: Crisis in long bonds is imminent)
"I can only say: I'm sorry, America," he wrote. "The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time."
Huszar told "Fast Money" that the bond-buying program, which was supposed to increase credit availability to consumers and businesses, didn't do so.
"There was actually a net decrease in mortgage lending," he said. "In fact, until 2012 mortgage lending was at a 15-year low."
(Read more: Dennis Gartman sees 'a massive top' in bonds)
QE's de facto support of the stock market left out a sizable portion of the people it was supposed to help, Huszar added.
"Let's be honest, 50 percent of Americans don't own stock," he said. "There's a certain amount of trickle-down monetary policy involved here. And there's a real question as to whether that works compared to the huge costs that the program has."
Huszar also said that QE thwarted the idea of reining in banks "too big to fail."
"By virtue of reflating the markets, we've potentially taken the emphasis out of breaking up what is ultimately a banking cartel in the United States," he said, adding that "0.2 percent of banks control 70 percent of assets in this country."

HUSBAND SETS WIFE ON FIRE AT PUMP!!!

GOOGLE ENLISTED TO FIX OBAMACARE

Google Inc. (GOOG:US), Red Hat Inc. (RHT:US), Oracle Corp. (ORCL:US) and other technology companies are contributing dozens of computer engineers and programmers to help the Obama administration fix the U.S. health-insurance exchange website.

The help is arriving as the government’s main site for medical coverage remains plagued by repeated outages a month after its Oct. 1 debut. Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, innovation director for smartphone application maker Mobomo, are among those helping, the Obama administration said today.
“They are working through the analytics of what happens on the site to prioritize what needs to be fixed,” Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters on a conference call. Dickerson is working to improve the stability of the website, while Gershman is “helping the development process be more agile.”

VIDEO: Michael Leavitt on Obamacare Flaws, Sebelius

The administration began touting a “tech surge” on Oct. 20, to cure the software and technology errors on the federal website healthcare.gov that have prevented people from enrolling in health plans and insurers from collecting data. Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, apologized yesterday and said her agency has pulled in outside help to achieve “an optimally functioning” exchange by the end of November.

Offering Help

“I know it’s a very political topic,” Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said today at the software maker’s annual meeting. “As an information technology company we are doing everything we can to help.”
Redwood City, California-based Oracle is the world’s largest database-software maker.
The federal website is the main portal for millions of uninsured people in 36 of the 50 U.S. states to shop for private health insurance plans, with the help of government tax credits, as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Fourteen states have created their own health insurance websites. An estimated 7 million people will gain coverage in 2014 through the federal and state exchanges, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Top Adviser

The administration hasn’t previously quantified the tech surge. Jeffrey Zients, President Barack Obama’s incoming chief economic adviser, was brought in to advise Bataille’s agency, and the project’s management has since been reorganized, with UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH:US)’s Quality Software Services unit now overseeing the entire operation.
The site previously had no lead contractor. It was built largely by a unit of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. (GIB/A) The UnitedHealth unit, QSSI, built a service called the “data services hub” that collects information about customers from the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies, and feeds it to the federal and state websites.

Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.” 
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said  Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

The White House does not dispute that many in the individual market will lose their current coverage, but argues they will be offered better coverage in its place, and that many will get tax subsidies that would offset any increased costs. “One of the main goals of the law is to ensure that people have insurance they can rely on – that doesn’t discriminate or charge more based on pre-existing conditions.  The consumers who are getting notices are in plans that do not provide all these protections – but in the vast majority of cases, those same insurers will automatically shift their enrollees to a plan that provides new consumer protections and, for nearly half of individual market enrollees, discounts through premium tax credits,” said White House spokesperson Jessica Santillo