Jo Nocera:

‘They should have let Bear Stearns fail,” Sheila Bair said.

It was midmorning on a crisp June day, and Bair, the 57-year-old outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the federal agency that insures bank deposits and winds down failing banks — was sitting on a couch, sipping a Starbucks latte. We were in the first hour of several lengthy on-the-record interviews. She seemed ever-so-slightly nervous.

Bloomberg:

Buffett on today’s job numbers and why he’s confident we’ll get the 2.5 million jobs lost in the current recession back:

“Because the American economy works that way. We have gone through, I don’t know how many recessions, perhaps 15 in the history of this country.”

“But, our system over-shoots periodically. And in this particular case we had a huge bubble. So the fact that there’s a correction after that should not be unexpected. But our system always comes back and it will this time. And it already is.”

On whether the country will recover most of the 2.5 million lost jobs by the 2012 elections:

“I think there’s a good chance of that. We will come back big-time on employment when residential construction comes back. And we way over-produced in houses. I mean we were forming a million or 1.2 million households and we were building close to two million residential units.”

“Big surprise, we ended up with too many houses. We’re not going to blow them up. We’re not going to have kids start getting married at 12 or something. There’s a natural correction. The only way a correction takes place is to have households formation exceed new construction by a significant amount for a significant period of time.”

“We’ve had it for quite a while. And when you see these figures of five or 600,000, that means we’re sopping up housing inventory and I don’t know exactly when that hits equilibrium, but it isn’t five years from now I know that. And I think it actually could be reasonably soon.”