Washington, Sep 14 (DPA) President Barack Obama Monday said the need for hundreds of billions of dollars in financial industry bailouts was easing as the global economy recovers, but continued to push for a drastic overhaul of financial regulation in the US.

One year after the collapse of investment banking giant Lehman Brothers Holdings, a bankruptcy that sent Wall Street into a tailspin, Obama was looking to regain momentum for his proposals to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again.

In a speech at the historic Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York, Obama said there were signs the US economy had turned a corner, and said the government was beginning to extricate itself from a series of dramatic interventions in financial markets.

'Although I will never be satisfied while people are out of work and our financial system is weakened, we can be confident that the storms of the past two years are beginning to break,' Obama said.

'In fact, while there continues to be a need for government involvement to stabilize the financial system, that necessity is waning,' he said. 'The growing stability resulting from these interventions means we are beginning to return to normalcy.'

The Treasury Department has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in US banks over the past year to keep them afloat, while the Federal Reserve has used a variety of tools to free up bank lending, which essentially froze in the wake of Lehman's collapse.