we'll hear from bob diamond, up next, blackrock chairman larry fink talks about what kind of recovery re might see. >> people ask me, the severe economy, the new economy. i like to call it the, essentially the swish economy. >>> a power player in restoring liquidity to wall street. larry fink was the government's go-to guy to help put a price tag on troubled assets at fannie mae, freddie mac and aig. his firm was willing to take the risk. backing a $1 trillion fed program to acquire residential mortgage-backed securities. fink also counseled then treasury secretary henry paulson on the original rollout of the t.a.r.p. plan. he was convinced that using t.a.r.p. funds to acquire toxic assets from the banks was the right move. if paulson opted to acquire equity stakes, which fink says was a major mistake. as a stock market has rebounded in 2009, economic recovery has been slow to follow. blackrock chairman ceo larry fink shared his opportunity and what it will take for a broader recovery to truly gain traction. based on the economic backdrop, is the market and money on the sidelines movi

i was speaking with larry fink and i asked larry do you think it's going to happen, do you think they will bail them out? he said if they don't bail them out, it's armageddon. how did larry think it was going to be armageddon, but hank paulson who has been a ceo, tim geithner, who has been in the regulatory apparatus, ben bernanke, an economist who i guess studied the great depression, how did they not know this? don't you think we're letting them off the hook to have regulators that did not know what might happen in some respect, you know? >> no, charlie, i don't think so. larry is a very smart guy. to his credit and to the regulators a credit they talked to him frequently. i'm sure he had a chance to impart that to them. again, add view and maybe saw it differently. i'm sure it was shared with them. again, these were unusual times, and i think they did a superb job. >> bill, do you have a question? >> i do, mr. mack, bill griffeth here. i'm curious, for generations wall street has been the place to go for younger generations coming out of college to make money. i mean, that's been t

bla blackrock's larry fink, goldman sachs, jamie dimon comes out a winner, and jpmorgan. and barclays was able to secure a solid foot hold in the united states by acquiring lehman's assets. regardless, everybody involved was fielding phone calls all weekend to ensure their own survival. >> going into the first part of this year, we just went from bad to worse, worse to worse to worse. and the marketplace was so frightened that people put so much of their free money into cash. they had to store their wealth in something that was earning zero. >> it was stressful. it was emotional. we know we were playing for big stakes. so on the one hand we knew that if lehman went into bankruptcy, there would be huge implications on the market. on the other hand, we wanted to look at whether or not there was a transaction that made sense both for barclays as well as for the markets. >> and there obviously was. we visited that barclays trading floor which, of course, was the lehman brothers. they did well after selling the global investor business, a asset management business of barclays