In a pair of separate interviews, President Obama defended his administration's response to the economic crisis in the wake of Vice President Joe Biden's remark Sunday that "we misread how bad the economy was."
"I would actually -- rather than say misread, we had incomplete information," President Obama told NBC News' Chuck Todd. "What we always knew was that a) this recession was gonna be deep, and b) it was gonna last for a while."
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"There's nothing that we would have done differently," Obama added in an interview with ABC News. "We needed a stimulus and we needed a substantial stimulus."
In response to critics -- including retired Gen. Colin Powel and Warren Buffet -- who have publicly worried about the deficit, Obama said there were "legitimate concerns. In the midterm and long term we're going to have to get control of that."
"The question that some have argued is, 'Okay, what next?' Maybe you stop the freefall but you still have close to 10% unemployment,'" the president said. "And you know, this is something that we wrestle with constantly ... [W]e inherited a big deficit, and it is at a certain point potentially counterproductive if we're spending more money than we're having to borrow."