Washington  - US President Barack Obama backed his embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and said his job was safe, during an interview to CBS News' 60 Minutes programme to be broadcast Sunday.

In excerpts released Saturday, Obama joked that were Geithner to offer to resign, he would say, "Sorry buddy, you've still got the job."

There have been calls for Geithner to quit amid the widening recession and the growing public ire over bailed-out insurance giant AIG's payment of 165 million dollars in bonuses.

Obama said the criticism was natural. "It's going to take a little bit more time than we would like to make sure that we get this plan just right. Of course, then we'd still be subject to criticism," he said.

"'What's taken so long?' You've been in office a whole 40 days and you haven't solved the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression'," the president laughed and said.

Responding to a comment that Wall Street executives thought the appointments of Geithner and Lawrence Summers, as his top economic advisor, meant he would be more supportive of them, Obama responded that "those people need to get out of town."

"They need to spend a little time outside of New York. Because ... if you go to North Dakota, or you go to Iowa, or you go to Arkansas, where folks would be thrilled to be making 75,000 dollars a year - without a bonus - then I think they'd get a sense of why people are frustrated."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration was preparing to unveil a plan early next week that would remove troubled assets from banks' balance sheets. Geithner intends to expand the Federal Reserve's new 1 trillion dollar Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to buy frozen assets, Bloomberg financial news reported.

"We're going to move quickly to lay out a new financing programme to deal with these legacy assets," Geithner told Bloomberg TV at a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Britain last weekend. "We have and expect to see a lot of support for this programme." (dpa)