Obama answers iReporter
Pres. Obama answers a question from iReporter Guy Watson.

I've received a lot of questions from CNN, iReporter, so went to our website, they wanna ask you question directly. This one was from Guy Watson in Albuquerque.

My question is why have you chosen to give our tax money to the banks, without holding them responsible or forcing them to lower their rates for startups and to facilitate refinancing of, foreclosing homes.

You hear that a lot. I do. And I think it's important to understand, first of all that the so-called bank bailout started before we came in. I actually think it was the right thing to do in a crisis we had to make sure that you didn't have a complete meltdown, which would have been even worse. And I've said in the past I supported President Bush's decision to move forward on that. Once we got them in a place where they were not longer in crisis, the problem was things were put together so quickly last year that there weren’t as many strings attached as we have liked, and so what we've tried to is to create some structures after the effect, that would impose more accountability, more discipline. You known the most obvious example would be the rules on executive pay. But it's always hard to do, particularly when a lot of these banks now get well and then just pay the money back and so we now not longer have leverage. This is why I think it's so important moving forward to make sure that we got a financial regulatory framework that protects consumers, make sure that they are not getting gouged, make sure that there is a lot of clarity in terms of mortgages they are getting. In the meantime, just on an emergency basis, we are tying to do everything we can to poke, prod, incentivize banks to help responsible homeowners who through no fault of their own are finding very tough for them to pay for their mortgage, to make sure that businesses are getting loans. We've massively expanded small businesses lending through the SBA. Those are all steps we've taken, but look, I understand people's frustrations. I mean the American people have gone through a very tough year, and you know, my job as president is to help navigate through this tough year. And you know people who don't have a job right now, people who have lost their home, you know, I've been mad too, and they expect me to do something about it. And you know, my job is to within the institutional constraints that I have and the resources constraints that we have because we also inherited a structural deficits of several trillion dollars to try to make the best decisions possible to help as many people as possible.

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