President Obama speaks at Georgetown University, Washington DC, April 15, 2009.

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that aggressive efforts to boost the US economy were beginning to bear fruit, even though the recession would cause more pain this year. Also on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke provided some hope that recession may be losing its momentum, when he said he is "fundamentally optimistic" about the economy's longer term prospects and spoke of tentative signs of a slowdown in the decline in economic activity.

However, retail sales data dampened recent optimism which was fuelled by positive housing and manufacturing sector data.

Finfacts Report: US retail sales unexpectedly plunged in March

President Obama in a speech to students at Georgetown University, acknowledged that many Americans think he is taking on too much at once, or, conversely, not doing enough at all, or just wondering how all the pieces of his agenda fit together. The White House said the past three months have seem a storm of activity, with initiatives on housing, the markets, the auto industry, small businesses, international financial cooperation, and job creation through the Recovery Act. On Tuesday, the White House said the President made it his central purpose to explain the vision that has served as the foundation for every major initiative on the economy.

President Obama said again that he detects “glimmers of hope,”  and he pleaded for patience from an instant-gratification society that usually responds to crisis with “a lurch from shock to trance.”

“It’s more than most Congresses and most presidents have to deal with in a lifetime,” Obama said. “But we have been called to govern in extraordinary times. And that requires an extraordinary sense of responsibility to ourselves, to the men and women who sent us here, to the many generations whose lives will be affected for good or for ill because of what we do here.”

“This is all welcome and encouraging news, but it does not mean that the hard times are over,”he said. While administration and Fed officials expect the economy will begin to show signs of recovery later this year, they are reluctant to forecast a turn in the economic cycle.

The President, in his 85th day in office, said he had used the time to “clear the wreckage” from the economic collapse in order to prevent the recession from getting deeper. But he cautioned against expectations of a rapid recovery. “The severity of this recession will cause more job losses, more foreclosures, and more pain before it ends,” he said.

The New York Times reports today that the Obama administration is drawing up plans to disclose the conditions of the 19 biggest banks in the country, according to senior administration officials, as it tries to restore confidence in the financial system without unnerving investors.

The administration has decided to reveal some sensitive details of the stress tests now being completed after concluding that keeping many of the findings secret could send investors fleeing from financial institutions rumored to be weakest.

While all of the banks are expected to pass the tests, some are expected to be graded more highly than others. Officials have deliberately left murky just how much they intend to reveal - - or to encourage the banks to reveal — about how well they would weather difficult economic conditions over the next two years.

As a result, indicating which banks are most vulnerable still runs some risk of doing what officials hope to avoid.

The President said he hears most often in letters from people across the country, is outrage about the government support for banks teetering on failure. As he did throughout the speech, he took time to address opposing arguments and perspectives. To those who take the intuitively and emotionally understandable position that the banks should be left fail – "where’s my bailout?" in short – he argued that in truth a dollar in credit can have an immense multiplier effect that will produce a much greater gain in terms of jobs and the broader economy. And in turn, the failure of those banks would have a vastly disproportionate impact on every American. To those who urge the preemptive takeover of banks, "the nationalization argument" as he called it, he gave assurance that his reticence to engage in that strategy was not born of ideological rigidity or moral obligation to shareholders, but rather a belief that this strategy would cause even bigger losses for taxpayers.

Banks that were shown with insufficient capital in the stress tests would be held accountable and forced to clean up their balance sheets. “Governments should practice the same principles as doctors – first, do no harm,” he said.“We believe that pre-emptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end . . . because it is likely to undermine rather than create confidence.”