WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama urged businesses to “step up” and hire workers, pressing banks and other corporations to do more to help an economy that he said would take “several years” to recover fully. In a town-hall style meeting conducted by CBS News on Wednesday, Obama said the weak housing market and high gasoline prices were the biggest “headwinds” dragging on the economy. “We've got a lot more work to do to get businesses to invest and to hire,” he told the audience in remarks broadcast on Thursday. “It's going to take us several years for us to get back where we need to be.” The strength of the US economy is likely to be the main factor that determines whether Obama will succeed in holding on to the White House next year. He said businesses and banks that reaped the rewards of extraordinary measures to pull the country out of a deep recession had a responsibility now to invest hordes of cash into US jobs. “It is time for companies to step up,” Obama said. “American taxpayers contributed to that process of stabilizing the economy. Companies have benefited from that, and they're making a lot of money, and now's the time for them to start betting on American workers and American products.” US companies created jobs at the fastest pace in five years in April, according to the Labor Department, pointing to underlying strength in the economy even as the jobless rate hit 9.0 percent.
