Obama: No 'Easy Out' for Wall Street

Obama: '$100 Million Bonuses Are Not a Birthright'

MORAN: People are angry, there's so much taxpayer money going into the banks. Why shouldn't the government, why shouldn't you just fire the executives who wrecked these banks in the first place and tanked the world's financial system in the process?

OBAMA: Well, some of them are gone because their institutions have effectively collapsed. You know, keep in mind. though, there are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well managed; JP Morgan being a good example. Jamie Dimon, the CEO there; I don't think he should be punished for doing a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio.

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And so what we want to do is to say, if you're going to take money from the taxpayers, then you're going to be constrained in terms of how you give yourself compensation and shareholders are going to be empowered.

If you're not taking money, then we'll let shareholders and boards of directors handle things as they generally have handled them. I do hope that we're going to see a change in culture where everybody in the financial system starts recognizing that ... $100 million bonuses annually are not a birthright [LAUGHS] and that, you know, we've got to recognize that if you're going to reward people for success, you've also got to punish them for failure and that hasn't been happening.

MORAN: Take a step back, you've been sounding some very dire warnings about the economy in recent days. How close do you think the country is to a kind of economic catastrophe that you're warning them?

OBAMA: Well, you know, I'm constantly trying to thread the needle between sounding alarmist but also letting the American people know the circumstances that we're in. And the fact of the matter is that we are in not just an ordinary recession, we are in a perfect storm of financial problems and now, a decline in worldwide demand that is resulting in huge numbers of jobs being shed, the lowest consumer confidence we've seen, credit locked up.

And so this was a big difficult situation. Now, I think we've got to keep perspective. We're not going through the Great Depression. I know there have been some analogies there but when FDR took over, unemployment at that time was 30 percent, as opposed to 7.5 or 7.6.

And so, you know, I think it's important to recognize we've still got enormous assets, we've got the same workforce that we did that's as productive as it's ever been, we've still got some of the best universities in the country and, you know, a wonderful infrastructure and some great companies.

You know, I spoke with the CEO of International yesterday, who's investing billions of dollars in opening up new plants in the face of this recession. And so some of what we need is just a restoration of confidence and people's belief that in fact, we can harness all these resources to continue to be the most dynamic economy on earth.

But we're not going to get there by pretending that we don't have some very big problems and I think the American people understand that.