Washington, Feb. 10: President Obama covered a wide range of issues in his first primetime press conference.

Among them was the state of the American economy.

Obama said: "If you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of. We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough, and as a consequence, they suffered."

"We are going through the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression. We''ve lost, now, 3.6 million jobs. But what''s perhaps even more disturbing is that almost half of that job loss has taken place over the last three months, which means that the problems are accelerating instead of getting better," he added.

"It's important for us to have a bill of sufficient size and scope that we can save, or create, four million jobs," the president said. (ANI)