Washington  - The centrepiece of Barack Obama's economic rescue plans will become law Tuesday, the culmination of a six-week process full of partisan wrangling that handed the US president his first significant victory since inauguration.

Obama is to sign a 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus bill at a ceremony in Denver, Colorado. The largest single spending measure in US history is intended to help the country recover from a year-long recession that many consider the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Obama administration said the rescue package, a mix of two- thirds spending projects and one-third tax cuts, will save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. The bill was passed Friday by both houses of Congress, but with scant support from minority Republicans who sought a smaller, tax cut-heavy bill.

With the stimulus in effect, Obama will turn his attention Wednesday to the next crisis on the horizon - a record wave of home foreclosures in the country that is blamed for sparking the current economic crisis.

Obama will present his plans for stemming the housing downturn in Phoenix, Arizona, one of the areas of the country hardest-hit by plunging home prices over the last two years.

Obama has promised to spend at least 50 billion dollars - taken from an existing 700-billion-dollar financial rescue bill passed in October - to help people refinance their mortgages and halt the decline in home prices. His speech Wednesday is intended to flesh out the details.

More than 3 million people were in foreclosure in 2008 as home prices plunged nearly 20 per cent across the country. The mortgage defaults cost financial institutions hundreds of billions of dollars, sparking bankruptcies and prompting a nationwide restriction of new loans that further depressed the US economy.

About 3.6 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007, the sharpest drop since 1945. Unemployment now stands at 7.6 per cent. (dpa)