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Co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box shares what some people in the banking industry are saying about Obama's economic plan. (3:22)
 

Full interview. (12:34)
 

Tavis: Becky Quick is the co-anchor of CNBC's popular morning program, "Squawk Box," who previously covered the Wall Street beat and the economy for "The Wall Street Journal." She joins us tonight from CNBC headquarters in New Jersey.

Becky, I know it's late for you to still be at work, but thanks for joining us tonight, I appreciate it.

Becky Quick: Well, I'm glad to be here, Tavis. It's good to see you.

Tavis: Let me start by asking the question everybody's talking about - whether or not President Obama this week restored or at least raised the confidence level of Americans where our economy is concerned. What do you think?

Quick: Yeah, I think he knocked it out of the park when it comes to the tone in terms of confidence and reassurance, and just telling all of us that we will make it through all of this. That was the instant feedback, and that was the instant read that we got from people.

But then when you started digging into it, as investors always do, they worried a little bit because they don't have all the details. They don't have everything they want to know about where we're headed, what the financial plans are, and so initially you heard people saying, "Yes, that was perfect, that was exactly what we needed." But as the day wore on you had more people starting to say, "Okay, now where's the details? Tell us how we're going to get through it."

Tavis: Unpack those concerns for me. I hear your point that they want more details. What is it that they are specifically worried or concerned about vis-à-vis those details, whatever they may be?

Quick: All right. Well, one of the big terms we've been talking about for a few weeks now is nationalization of the banks. The banks very likely, at least a couple of them, are going to need more money. The question is, what's the government do at that point?

Do they step in and provide the capital, take preferred shares again? Do they take common shares? What does that mean? Does it wipe out any common shareholders who are left? Do they basically have the government taking over some of those banks?

There have been a lot of questions, and there's been a lot of answers that have been given from different administration officials. Yesterday, Ben Bernanke talked an awful lot about things. This week, he has been making some comments that had reassured a lot of investors that the government was not interested in nationalizing these banks; that they would make sure there was always a private banking sector.

And when you heard words like that coming out, when you've heard comments like that coming, Wall Street and investors seemed to relax a little bit. Then you'll hear places - other places - Chris Dodd was the one, the senator, who made some statements saying yes, we're going to have to head towards nationalization.

When you hear comments like that, you watch the market react almost instantaneously. That really worries people. But what I hear from investors all the time, and these are major, major investors, is more than anything they just want to know what the rules of the game are, because it's very difficult to convince people to jump in and put their money to work if they don't know if the rules are going to get changed next week.

Tavis: You mentioned Ben Bernanke. One of the things that stunned me, and you cover this every day, I do not, but as one who talks about these issues semi-regularly on this program, more regularly of late because of the economy, I was stunned personally to hear the fed chairman suggest that if everything is done just right we could come out of this recession by 2010. That's, like, a year from now.

And everything I've heard from everybody else is that it's going to get worse before it gets better, unemployment's going to go up, we didn't get in this overnight, it's going to take time to get out.

What is he talking about when he suggests that we could be out of this recession within a year?

Quick: Well, I think he tried to hedge that very carefully, and you pointed this out with your comments about it. He said that if we do everything exactly right, if we have a little bit of luck that's thrown in along the way, you may see an improvement that starts to show up sometime in 2010.

Now, that would be fantastic. Of course you're talking about growth off of some very low levels, and the good news is every time you see numbers that are worse than we were expecting, well, the good news is it's going to be easier to look better in comparison to those numbers. So that's the good news.

I think things have been trending down so, so quickly that you start to think okay, maybe there's a way to grow off of those worse-than-expected numbers that are coming through. But economists at this point are very concerned that this could be longer and deeper than even that.

I remember just a few weeks ago people were still saying okay, by the end of the second half of 2009, then things are going to start looking better. Well, I don't hear anybody saying that anymore. In fact, Ben Bernanke with his comments about 2010, that's probably some of the most optimistic stuff that I've heard out there.

The stress test that they're now talking about for these big banks, where they run them through the paces, they're going to do it on two different levels. The first level is to go ahead and see how those banks do when you take a consensus read of what economists are expecting over the next, say, year or so.

The second-case scenario, though, is when things look worse - it's a worse case scenario, when things look even worse than we expected. And even though Ben Bernanke may be making these comments, sure, the best case scenario is we get through things and we start to look better by 2010, in the background they are running these checks, assuming that things could be worse than that.

Tavis: Give me your read, Becky, on how the president did this week, how he is doing with this tightrope act, as I call it. On the one hand, you want to say to the American people, I understand you're not feeling the banks these days, I understand that you don't want to put more money in the banks. On the other hand, he doesn't want to slam the banks too much because he is, in fact, going to give them what they're asking for. How's he walking that tightrope?

Quick: Well, Tavis, I think you are totally right. This is a tightrope and this is a very high tightrope that he's having to walk across and look down. It's pretty scary in either direction.

I think he's doing a great job, honestly. I think he - every time he speaks, he tries to give a little bit to each side, and I think when I talk to people - it's funny, there was a driver in a car I was talking to last night; he was furious and yelling. My mom was furious and yelling when I talked to her just a little while earlier. You go out to a restaurant and you talk to the waiter and he'll be furious and yelling.

And I guess if you're making everybody mad you're probably doing the right thing, because you are not catering to one constituency over the other. Honestly, I think he's doing a great job. I think every time he speaks he's pretty careful to do that. On the couple occasions when he's gone too far in one direction or the other, the next time out he'll correct that.

So I think it's an impossible task, or a next-to-impossible task, but I think he went a long way in really making a lot of people feel better in the comments that he made in the not State of the Union Address.

Tavis: The driver, your mom, and the waiter are all everyday people. What are you hearing - take me on the inside of what they're saying about him in the banking industry.

Quick: In the banking industry? Well, that depends on who you talk to. There are a lot of people right now who actually - but they'll say this very quietly, they don't want to come on camera and say things like this. But they will say yes, he is doing the right job. And it's not just him, it's what the fed's doing, it's what Treasury is doing.

There are those key people who are there - you talk about Bernanke, you talk about Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, you talk about Larry Summers. They are the key players there and people say yes, they are making progress, especially with this mortgage plan that they came out with. A lot of people have said that was very detailed, that's exactly what they should be doing.

Now there's this new capitalization program, this cap program that is the bank stress testing program. People say they like the details there as well. They would just like to see more details more quickly, and that's probably a case of having too high expectations when Obama first came into office.

When he first took over in the presidency, people thought okay, this is going to be here are the answers, here's what happens. These problems are very complex and we probably were just misleading ourselves to think we'd get those answers even sooner.

Tavis: What does the mortgage plan mean for everyday Americans who own homes?

Quick: Well, it means, at least if your mortgage is owned by Fannie or Freddie, it means that you very likely can go in and try and qualify to refinance your mortgage. Now, I will say that even though we've gotten a lot of these details, they're still being worked out. And I was talking to a banker who's very closely involved behind the scenes on this yesterday, and he called me back later to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, what we thought were the details are not the details. Let me clarify a few of those things."

So even the people who are responsible for carrying out these new mortgage plans don't know exactly what's in it at this point. There is still some confusion, but overall it's going to mean that a lot of Americans who need to get better rates, who are looking even for a few hundred dollars less in their mortgage payments every month, are very likely going to qualify for that.

The bar is not going to be set all that high. You are going to have to prove that you can make the payments this time around. This is not like those mortgages that they were handing out to anybody five years ago - three years ago, even - where you didn't even have to prove you had a job to qualify.

This time around you're going to have to qualify, but it very likely means that many, many Americans will be able to shave a few hundred dollars a month off their mortgage payments, and that could make all the difference for some people who are facing tough times.

Tavis: And for folk right now, Becky, who are facing foreclosure?

Quick: For folks who are facing foreclosure, I would say hold on. Try and get there, and if you can hold out a few more months you very likely can get some help.

Now, this plan is not going to save everybody. In fact, when we speak to the administration officials who are involved, they say their best hope is that through this plan, through this mortgage plan, they're going to be able to get you into a different mortgage, help you out again, but very likely 40 percent of the time those people will go into foreclosure anyway. That's their best-case scenario.

And the plans that the government's been laying out over the last few months, they've had more than 50 percent of the people who have gone into foreclosure anyway. You're not talking about a cure-all, you're not talking about necessarily handing the keys to the house to these people, you're talking about the government trying to do their best to help those people who can possibly hold on to these things.

But you are going to see an increase in foreclosures, and you are going to see a lot of people who are still facing some very tough times.

Tavis: President Obama teed up - he teed it up this week; that is to say, teed up the fact that the banks are going to ask for more money, we're going to have to pour more money into the banks. Do we have any idea, any sense of what we're talking here, or is this just an open checkbook at this point?

Quick: Man, Tavis, I wish I had the answer for you on that, but I think anybody who tells you they have the answer doesn't know that much. Because the people I respect the most, the people who I think have the best handle on this, say they just don't know. That's why the stress test itself is going to have to run two different scenarios.

When you watch the market fall on a daily basis, and this week we've had a few scary times, when you watch the market fall, that changes everything. It changes the value of the assets that are in there, so anybody who tells you they do know the answer I would say probably doesn't know what they're talking about.

Tavis: For the average American who's just watching this and understands the basics, as I do, which is this - that if this is, in fact, the worst economic situation we've been in since the Great Depression, that pretty much means, pardon my English, that there ain't nobody in Washington who really knows what happened then because they weren't around to pull us out of that Depression.

So here's the question - do we really know what we're doing here, or are we just trying different things to see what is going to work, what sticks, so to speak?

Quick: I would say it's a little bit of both. On the concern side, yeah, we've tried a whole bunch of plans and some of them haven't worked the way we thought. The government has had to go back and say, we're going to do this - no, wait, that's not going to happen; this isn't working, we've got to go - and you've seen it over the last few months. There have been fits and starts.

Now, while we don't have people who are around who got us out of this last time around, we do have some people - and this is the positive side of things - we do have some people who have studied it and who know this inside-out.

Ben Bernanke is one of them. He spent his entire career studying the Great Depression and trying to find ways to prevent it from happening again. He's a great guy to have there. Tim Geithner has been studying on all of these things. He also has people like Paul Volcker and Warren Buffett, who know these things inside-out and who have been advising the administration and offering them their suggestions as well. Paul Volcker is very intimately involved. And these are guys who have been around for a long, long time, who know these things, who say yes, this is the worst they've seen in their lifetimes.

But also you have some real students of what works and what doesn't, and that's the thing that we should all at least feel a little bit better about. They know more than you and I do, Tavis.

Tavis: Well, that wouldn't be tough, to know more than what I know. (Laughter)

Quick: Me either.

Tavis: No, you know a lot, you cover this every day. Speaking of covering, here's the exit question. I would assume that covering this story for you every day as a business reporter, as a host, is like a roller coaster.

Quick: Yeah, you're not kidding. It's been a roller coaster for so many months, I can't remember. All of us around have been putting off our vacations and putting off everything, because you just think, well, around the corner things are going to get better. But having a front row seat on this, while you hate seeing the troubles that it causes, is - this is stuff we cannot turn away from, and Tavis, I've never, ever seen anything like this, and the daily changes, the pace of change, the level of things that are happening, having a front-row seat, we've been very lucky to have that.

Tavis: Yeah, well, I'll put you higher on my prayer list, Becky.

Quick: Tavis, thank you very much. (Laughter) We'll buckle up and we'll hold on and see what happens.

Tavis: Becky Quick, the co-anchor of "Squawk Box" on CNBC. Becky, thanks for your insight, and delighted to have you on the program.

Quick: Thanks, Tavis. Good talking to you.

Tavis: Thank you.