(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The only way to avoid a crisis of this magnitude is to ensure that large firms can't take risks that threaten our entire financial system, and to make sure they have the resources to weather even the worst of economic storms.

SEN. JIM DEMINT, R-S.C.: Instead of looking at more regulation, we could do a lot by fixing our tax system in this country to make us globally competitive.

The president needs to focus on what has caused problems and look at what has really made America so prosperous. And I'm afraid that's not the lens he's looking through right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRET BAIER, HOST: Exactly one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, President Obama traveled to Wall Street where he delivered a speech today calling for new rules to protect consumers, also a new consumer financial protection agency to enforce those rules, and broader oversight of the entire financial system.

What about this speech? Let's bring in our panel: Steve Hayes, senior writer for The Weekly Standard; Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Mara, what was new in this speech?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: There's wasn't anything new in terms of policy proposals. He has made those before. And, as a matter of fact, they're running into trouble from his own party on Capitol Hill.

I think that he has some tough talk for Wall Street. He said we're not going to let you - we're not going to let firms that are too big to fail collapse on the taxpayers' dime ever again.

The problem is that I don't know if a lot of people on Wall Street believe him. One year after this crisis, you have people making big profits again. There are fewer investment firms, but they're doing fine and they're paying big bonuses.

And it is unclear if the package that he wants Congress to pass would actually change things in the future. I think there is a sense now maybe that his bark is worse than his bite. And part of that is because he is getting pushback from a lot of Democrats.

But I don't, in terms of what Jim DeMint was saying, I don't think the reason we had the Wall Street crisis was because of the tax system. There was not enough financial regulations - not just at Wall Street firms but also at Fannie and Freddie Mae. And it is unclear whether the package the president wants would fix that.

BAIER: Charles?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Essentially what got us away from the brink - we're not out of the woods, but we're off the precipice - was the substitution of U.S. government debt for private debt, which was lousy. That is essentially the whole story. And in the end, people believed in the dollar and in the U.S. government's faith in credit, and as it was substituted for bad debt, it stabilized the system.

The problem is this: Even though the government is beginning to wind down, even though credit is flowing and, in part, the government is withdrawing the exquisite guarantees - for instance, at the end of the month, the guarantees to money market funds is going to expire. Those are explicit guarantees. The problem is that everybody interests are that the implicit guarantees are still in place. Nobody will say it but everyone understands it. The government is not going to allow the money markets to fail the way it did last September when they were in trouble and they were guaranteeing it. It will not allow a huge bank to fail, even though it's not explicit.

So in a sense, the government is still hanging behind. It is almost like the situation of a Freddie and Fannie before the crash. Everybody understood it was an implicit guarantee. So you had all these nominally private institutions with the government standing behind. That's why I think in principle regulation is a good idea. It's got to be good and smart and targeted regulation, but I'm not against it in industries which are not truly independent and where the government is the bailer-out of last resort and it still is in the financial industry.

BAIER: Steve, a lot of concern is that the pendulum swings too far the other way.

STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: I think that's a very legitimate concern.

One thing that was most interesting to me about this speech, and there were echoes of the health care debate or health care argument the president has made, is his use of the language of markets to make a case that I think is fundamentally anti-free market.

At one point he said he was a strong believer in the power of the free market. He talked repeatedly in his speech about choice in competition, exactly the same words that we hear him use in health care. And yet he is proposing what I think most analysts would recognize, and you can be on either side of whether it's a good thing or not, most analysts would acknowledge this is massive government intrusion into the financial services sector. I think perhaps there could be more regulation.

I guess I would differ from Mara's analysis in that I would say different kinds of regulation rather than more regulation in toto, but I think that's the probably quibbling on the margins. But it was very interesting to see him make essentially a statist case for more government intervention in the market in the language of free markets.

BAIER: Mara, he did say that the economy, in his opinion, is returning to normal. He credited the stimulus with that. He just said in his latest NBC interview - the CNBC interview today - that he has a strong inclination not to do a second stimulus package.

What about that?

LIASSON: Well, first of all, I don't think that he could pass a second stimulus package. I don't think there is any more appetite on the part of voters to spend more money. I think they could extend unemployment benefits and call that some kind of stimulus. They could, if this doesn't work, pass some tax cuts, but I don't think they can spend any more money.

I think the president, in terms of taking credit for the passing of the crisis, he said today the storms have begun to break. And I think that's correct.

The problem is that oftentimes he is left saying it would have been worse without the stimulus plan. In other words, he can't really say things are getting a lot better when unemployment is 9.7 percent. He has left arguing things would have been worse without my plan. That is a very hard thing to prove.

KRAUTHAMMER: Look, nobody seriously believes that the stimulus is what saved us or got us off the brink. What saved us was Henry Paulson, who took a wild swing. He was mostly lucky a year ago. He is the man who invented the huge number.

He decided that with the failure of confidence in the system, he had to invent a number so huge that nobody would believe him, and it was shock and awe. He came up with $700 billion. No one has ever heard of a number that high.

(CROSSTALK)

KRAUTHAMMER: Right, but when there is crisis of confidence and the Treasury Secretary says the U.S. government is going to pump unlimited amounts of money, and $700 billion a year ago sounded unlimited. Now it's lunch money, but at the time the arguments were over a billion here and a billion.

He was saying essentially we're going to put 5 percent of the GDP of the United States behind anything. And when that happened, people had a sense that the U.S. government was going to bail out anybody and everybody if it had to, and that had a calming effect.