Tide turning against unruly bears?

If you missed 60 Minutes like I did, here's what Big Ben had to say.

I'm not talking about Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlesberger. The real Big Ben is Bernanke, and he thinks the recession could end this year. Maybe.

Selfish as it sounds, I'm equally concerned about how his words will affect the market in the near term. Still have a small position in Citigroup and started another small one in Wells Fargo on Friday. So far, so good. C, which closed at $1.78 on Friday, is going bonkers in Tokyo.

¥196 = $2.00

It's off the high of ¥212, but the roller coaster ride will continue for C shares in the morning.

Excerpt from the interview:

Bernanke told 60 Minutes we were close to a second Depression and he is determined to not let the major banks fail on his watch.

"One of the things that I think many people watching this interview don't understand, is why there are multiple bailouts, four bailouts of AIG, three bailouts of Citigroup. There is a sense that this is a band-aid approach, that we're not getting to the root of the problem," Pelley remarked.

"Well, part of the issue is that, you know, the economy has gotten a good bit worse. You know, the first part of the crisis was subprime and other assets that were toxic. Now, we're in a second phase, which is that the economy is very weak," he said. "So the economy's weakness has meant that some of the initial attempts to stabilize the banks haven't been enough, and we've had to do more."

"You know, Mr. Chairman, there are so many people outside this building, across this country, who say, 'To hell with them. They made bad bets. The wages of failure on Wall Street should be failure,'" Pelley remarked.

"Let me give you an analogy, if I might," Bernanke said. "If you have a neighbor, who smokes in bed. And he's a risk to everybody. If suppose he sets fire to his house, and you might say to yourself, you know, 'I'm not gonna call the fire department. Let his house burn down. It's fine with me.' But then, of course, but what if your house is made of wood? And it's right next door to his house? What if the whole town is made of wood? Well, I think we'd all agree that the right thing to do is put out that fire first, and then say, 'What punishment is appropriate? How should we change the fire code? What needs to be done to make sure this doesn't happen in the future? How can we fire proof our houses?' That's where we are now. We have a fire going on."

Bernanke told Pelley that "fire" is still burning.

Asked if all the big banks the Fed regulates are solvent, Bernanke said, "I believe they are, yes. But we are doing a stress test right now, where we're looking at what the positions of the banks are under a tougher economic scenario than the one that we currently expect. And what we plan to do is to say how much capital would each bank need to be well capitalized. Not just solvent, but well capitalized, even in these more adverse scenarios."

"Are you committing in this interview, that you are not going to let any of these banks fail? That no matter what their balance sheet actually looks like, they are not gonna fail?" Pelley asked.

"They are not gonna fail," Bernanke said. "But what we can do, should it be necessary, is try to wind it down in a safe way."