U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is not discussing a second stimulus plan to jolt the U.S. economy out of recession, a White House budget official told Congress on Wednesday.

"No one in the administration is talking about a second stimulus at this point," said Robert Nabors, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is tracking the effects of the economic recovery plan already in effect.

But the White House press secretary, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, suggested that could change if the country continues to lose jobs.

Nabors testified at a House of Representatives hearing on oversight of the $787 billion stimulus plan.

"What we are focused on right now is implementing the recovery act that Congress has already passed," he added.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama is "not ruling anything out, but at the same time he's not ruling anything in" on another stimulus.

"We continue to watch what's going on," Gibbs said. "I think the bottom line for the president is, if there are steps that he thinks, and his team thinks, need to be taken to improve our economy, we won't hesitate to do that.

Obama is meeting this week with leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial nations in L'Aquila, Italy, to discuss solutions for the languishing world economy.

World markets, which had been recovering since March, have recently lost ground, in part because comments by an Obama economic adviser were seen as signaling a U.S. recovery was farther off than hoped. The Dow average fell 1 percent on Wednesday but later pared some of its losses to 8,120.

Laura D'Andrea Tyson, an economist who advised Obama during the 2008 campaign and is a member of his economic advisory panel, said on Tuesday that the United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus that focused on infrastructure investment.

Nabors told the hearing Tyson did not represent the White House.

"She's an outside economic adviser. She does not work for the administration," Nabors said.

When he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law in February, Obama hailed it as key to creating and saving jobs during the longest U.S. recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But with the unemployment rate now standing at 9.5 percent, its highest in more than two decades, some are wondering if the various tax and spending measures can accomplish that mission.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday that U.S. leaders should be open to a second stimulus, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, also a Democrat, has said he sees no evidence another recovery package is needed.

Nabors said the country's losing 467,000 jobs in June was "unacceptable," but he noted that the rate of loss was much slower than during the first quarter of the fiscal year when the average monthly job loss was 691,000 jobs.

He said other indicators, such as orders for durable goods, were turning upward, showing the stimulus was having a positive impact and in the near future the country would see "genuine economic expansion and crucial job creation."

Barack Obama senses that he's in the middle of a hurricane whose gale-force winds could blow history his way.

He doesn't mind acknowledging that he is learning as he goes, and he is not bitter about how little help he is getting from Republicans. But he will never again let bipartisanship become the defining test of his success.

And, yes, he is aware that the passage of his stimulus package, though a big deal three weeks into a presidency, is only a prelude to the "really tough" part. The next step, "getting credit flowing again" and averting "potential catastrophe in the banking system," may make the stimulus fight look like a friendly warm-up game.

The president offered his thoughts to a group of columnists whom he invited to accompany him Friday on Air Force One during his first visit home since he became president. He made his way west as his stimulus was nearing final passage in Congress, and to describe him as at ease would be merely to repeat one of the reigning cliches of his short presidency.

More striking was his sense that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its "inflection points."

"Leadership at those moments can help determine which direction that wave of change goes," he said. "I think it's very hard . . . for any single individual or politician to unleash historical momentum on its own. But I think when that historical wave is there, I think you can help guide it."

Asked if this were one of those moments, he replied, flatly, "yes." That may make the situation "scary sometimes," but it should also "make people determined and excited." Maybe that explains his good mood.

Yet Obama's purpose on Friday was not to play at being a philosopher of history but to stress his devotion to FDR-style pragmatism. "We will do what works," he said, reprising his administration's theme song. That "will require re-evaluation" and "some experimentation -- if that doesn't work then you do something else."

What clearly didn't work well was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's effort last week to lay out the administration's bank rescue plan. Obama offered no apologies. He argued that Geithner will keep working on an approach "over the next weeks, months, probably through the end of the year" because there is no "painless, quick fix here."

Obama is clear that he doesn't want to follow Japan's slow-moving bank rescue model from the 1990s, which "sort of papered things over, never really bit the bullet."

He's not ready to go down Sweden's road of temporarily nationalizing the banks. "You can make a good argument for the Swedish model, except for this fact: They only had a handful of banks," he said. "We've got thousands of banks. The scale, the magnitude of what we're dealing with is much bigger."

Yet on the continuum of Japan to Sweden, Obama is clearly closer to Sweden, and he pointedly refused to rule out the Swedish approach. "I think what you can say is I will not allow our financial system to collapse," he said. read more

President Barack Obama listened to a question at a town hall meeting in Elkhart, Ind., on Monday.

President Obama took his case for an $800 billion economic recovery package to one of the most distressed places in America on Monday as he opened a series of campaign-style events intended to press Congress to approve the plan by week’s end.

Wrapping himself in the mandate of his election last November, Mr. Obama sounded like a candidate all over again, scolding greedy Wall Street bankers and pointedly rejecting Republican critics for sticking with what he called a failed philosophy. At one point, he spoke about people with as many as five homes, which sounded like a reference to his opponent last fall, Senator John McCain.

“We can’t wait and see and hope for the best,” Mr. Obama told a packed high school gymnasium that sounded like an election rally. “We can’t posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place. That was what this election was all about. The American people rejected those ideas because they hadn’t worked. You didn’t send us to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same. You sent us there to change things.”

Mr. Obama used the event to hammer home what he called the benefits of his program of spending and tax breaks, promising that it would create or save nearly 80,000 jobs in Indiana, give 2.5 million state residents a $500 tax credit and provide health care, unemployment benefits and job training for tens of thousands more. Bringing it down to the most local level, he suggested his plan would help rebuild U.S. Highway 31 and build an overpass in Elkhart. read more

Pres. Barack Obama makes comments about economy during a meeting with Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas at the White House, 02 Feb 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama said he expects more banks to fail before the troubled U.S. financial system stabilizes.

In a television interview with NBC-TV broadcast Monday, Mr. Obama said it is likely that banks have not acknowledged all the losses they will experience. He said some banks, in his words, "won't make it."

The president also said he has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to set clear guidelines for financial institutions that receive assistance from the federal government. Last week, Mr. Obama criticized companies that paid big bonuses to their executives while they were asking for federal aid.

The president also is continuing to urge lawmakers to pass an economic stimulus bill designed to create jobs. The Senate Monday begins debate on the measure, which calls for about $820 billion in new spending and tax cuts.

A version of the bill was approved in the House of Representatives last week, without a single Republican voting for it.

Republicans also have warned that they will not vote for the Senate version unless it is revised to include more tax cuts and changes to how the money is spent.

The U.S. economy - the world's biggest - is in a recession. The country lost 2.6 million jobs last year and already has seen tens of thousands more layoffs this year.

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