Q Excuse me. The markets -- I think there were a lot of Americans and a lot of lawmakers who -- after what happened last week on Monday when the House failed to pass the rescue plan and the markets plummeted, many thought, well, okay, if we vote for it on Friday -- and many Americans again switched their calls and their e-mails and all to their lawmakers, saying, wow, okay we're in a crisis, vote for this thing, vote for this thing, and then everything will be better and the markets will be fine. Would you say that -- did lawmakers, did Americans have an incorrect perception of what this rescue plan was going to do? And again, when it comes towards the reassurance or acts of reassurance, is there anything else the administration is contemplating immediately that could give the calm and the reassurance that the markets obviously haven't found in this rescue plan?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think we need to give it a little bit of time. And this plan is going to take us -- it's a huge plan and a huge amount of money. And what the Treasury Department is doing is working as quickly as possible the find the right people to put in place so that they are protecting the American taxpayers' dollars and efficiently and effectively investing this money, and making sure that we can, first and foremost, protect the taxpayer, and also make good decisions.

And you can't make good decisions overnight. You have to find these people, and actually the amount of time that we're talking about to actually get something like this up and running is a very short amount of time. But if you're watching the markets on a daily basis or hourly basis or minute-by-minute basis, as many of us are, then it seems like it might be -- it might seem like it's too long. But what I can tell you is, Treasury -- the Treasury and the Fed Reserve are working day and night to make sure that we do this right, not just do it quickly.

So to the extent that anybody had a false impression of what was immediately going to happen in the markets, I guess I can't really speak to that. I would hope that wouldn't be true, because we have long said that it's going to take a little while to pull us out of it, but that we do think that this emergency package is the right thing to do.

Again, what you saw over the weekend and what you saw yesterday was people coming to grips with the reality that this problem is going to be felt not just in the United States but in emerging markets and established markets, like Europe, as well.

Wendell.

seen at 09:00, 7 October in Whitehouse Press Briefings. Email this to a friend.
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