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Transcript: Charlie Gibson Interviews President Bush
...BUSH: Well, that was, of course, the crystallization. When you have the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Fed [Ben Bernanke] say, if we don't act boldly, we could be in a depression greater than the Great Depression, that's an "uh-oh" moment. But you got to understand, leading up to that we had been bailing water in this way: AIG was failing; other big houses on Wall Street needed to be merged, one failed -- ...

Inside the Meltdown
ANNOUNCER: On September 18th, 2008, the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, arrived for an emergency meeting at the Capitol....

JOE NOCERA: Bernanke said, "If we don't do this tomorrow, we won't have an economy on Monday."...

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Bernanke says crisis 'no comparison' to Great Depression
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday the current economic situation bears "no comparison" to the much deeper crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.

"Well, you hear a lot of loose talk, but let me just ... say, as a scholar of the Great Depression -- and I've written books about the Depression and been very interested in this since I was in graduate school, there's no comparison," Bernanke said in a question period after an address in Austin, Texas.

Bernanke cited "an order-of-magnitude difference" in the current situation compared to the 1930s.

"During the 1930s, there was a worldwide depression that lasted for about 12 years and was only ended by a world war," he said.

"During that time, the unemployment rate went to 25 percent, at least, based on the data that we have. The real GDP (gross domestic product) fell by one-third. About a third of all of the banks failed. The stock market fell 90 percent."

Bernanke said the situation at that time represented "very difficult circumstances," because "we didn't have the social safety net that we have today. So let's put that out of our minds; there's no -- there's comparison in terms of severity."

He added, "We're very lucky to live in a country as rich and diversified as the one we have. And I hope that we will have a quick and rapid recovery from the current slowdown." ...