On "This Week," Vice President Biden made controversial remarks suggesting that the United States could not stop Israel from attacking Iran. He also spoke of economic forecasts:
BIDEN: The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there.
Everyone thought at that stage -- everyone -- the bulk of...
STEPHANOPOULOS: CBO would say a little bit higher.
BIDEN: A little bit, but they're all in the same range. No one was talking about that we would be moving towards -- we're worried about 10.5 percent, it will be 9.5 percent at this point.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But we're looking at 10 now, aren't we?
BIDEN: No. Well, look, we're much too high. We're at 9 -- what, 9.5 right now?
STEPHANOPOULOS: 9.5.
BIDEN: And so the truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited. Now, that doesn't -- I'm not -- it's now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we're in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we're in.
When Chuck Todd of NBC asked the president if he had "misread" the economy, the president replied:
No, no, no, well I would actually rather than say misread we had incomplete information. We came in January 20th. It was only after the first quarter numbers came in if you recall that suddenly everybody looked and said the economy shrank six percent. So it was happening much more rapidly at an accelerated pace than the projections out there at the time.
See similar comments to ABC's Jake Tapper.
Although the White House website includes recent interviews with foreign journalists, it includes none of these transcripts.
