At the Capitol during a rare Sunday session of the Senate, Obama delivered a closed-door pep talk to the fractious Democratic caucus that lasted about 45 minutes. Deep divisions remain over abortion coverage, but there was hope for compromise on whether the government should directly offer health insurance in competition with private companies.

“They’re going to get it done,” Obama said as he left. He avoided specifics in the meeting with senators and took no questions.

The health care legislation — Obama’s signature domestic policy goal — would provide coverage to more than 30 million additional people over the next decade with a new requirement for nearly everyone to purchase insurance. There would be new marketplaces where people could shop for and compare insurance plans, and lower-income people would get subsidies to help them afford coverage.

The federal-state Medicaid program for the poor would be expanded, and there would be a ban on unpopular insurance company practices such as denying coverage based on medical history.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who had invited Obama, sounded confident.

Republicans “want this to be, as one senator said, President Obama’s Waterloo,” Reid told reporters. “And it’s not going to be.”

White House spokesman Bill Burton said Obama thanked lawmakers for their work and encouraged them to move ahead on “this historic opportunity.” Democrats are keenly aware of former President Bill Clinton’s failure to pass health care legislation in 1994, and their repudiation at the polls that November.

Obama said this is “the most significant social legislation in decades — so don’t lose it,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. Obama was accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden and other senior administration officials.

Obama “pledged to work with us in any meaningful way that he can,” Reid told reporters.

Reid has 58 Democrats and two independents in the Democratic caucus. He may be able to get one or two Republican votes, at the most. He is still short of the 60 votes he needs to shut off debate and move to a final up-or-down vote on the bill.

Markstone Capital Partners chairman Elliott Broidy entered the plea in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday morning. He admitted to a felony charge of rewarding official misconduct.

Broidy is the latest in a string of private equity executives and investment advisers charged in connection with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s investigation of a pay-to-play scandal in the office of former state comptroller Alan Hevesi.

Cuomo, though, said Broidy’s case takes the probe in a different direction.

Four high-level officials in the comptroller’s office, he said, accepted gifts or other lucrative benefits from Broidy.

“This is an old fashioned payoff of state officials,” Cuomo said. “This is effectively bribery of state officials, and not just one, but a number of state officials in the comptroller’s office.”

Only one has already been charged in the case, the pension fund’s former chief financial officer, David Loglisci. He has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing.

Cuomo declined to name the three others, saying the investigation was not yet complete.

The gifts, the Attorney General’s office said, were lavish.

One official had Broidy funnel payments of $90,000 to his girlfriend to cover rent and hospital bills, plus another $44,000 in payments to the girlfriend’s relative, prosecutors said.

While that official has not been identified, a person familiar with the investigation said he is former Hevesi aide Jack Chartier, and the woman who received the money was the actress Peggy Lipton. Previous news reports have also linked Chartier and Lipton to the scandal. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because Chartier hasn’t been charged.

Another state official, prosecutors said, was rewarded indirectly when his relative was given a “sham” consulting contract worth more than $380,000.

Broidy also paid for a “very high ranking” senior official in the comptroller’s office to travel with his family to Israel and Italy on a luxurious trip that included helicopter tours. The vacation cost $75,000, the attorney general’s office said.

Additionally, Broidy put up $300,000 that was ultimately invested through an intermediary in the movie, “Chooch,” an obscure independent film set in Mexico and Queens produced by Loglisci’s brother.

The movie was financed with contributions from a number of businessmen trying to land investments from the state pension fund, valued in May at $109.9 billion. It was distributed on DVD by a company owned by the Quadrangle Group, the private equity firm founded by Steven Rattner, now the former head of the Obama administration’s auto industry task force.

Bernanke remained stoic during the roughly five-hour hearing by the Senate Banking Committee, which is weighing his nomination to a second four-year term. He acknowledged some mistakes but defended his record, saying that without the Fed’s bold action, the crisis would have been “markedly worse.”

And by day’s end, despite the verbal swipes and a move by one senator to block Bernanke’s nomination, his confirmation didn’t appear in doubt.

Some senators credited Bernanke with helping keep the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the panel, predicted Bernanke would win confirmation.

“Under your leadership, the Fed has taken extraordinary actions to right the economy,” said Dodd. “These efforts played, in my view, a very significant role in arresting the financial crisis.”

Nonetheless, Dodd wants to strip the Fed of some of its powers, including overseeing banks because regulators failed to crack down on dubious mortgages and other problems that figured prominently in the financial crisis.

Dodd and others drew a distinction between Bernanke’s economic leadership and the operations of the Fed as an institution itself.

If confirmed to another term, Bernanke vowed to work with Congress to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory structure and to bring about stronger and more effective supervision.

“It would be a tragedy if, after all the hardships that Americans have endured during the past two years, our nation failed to take the steps necessary to prevent a recurrence of a crisis of the magnitude we have recently confronted,” Bernanke told the panel.

Efforts already have begun at the Fed to tighten oversight of banks and other financial firms. And the central bank is actively engaged in identifying and implementing improvements, Bernanke said.

“A financial crisis of the severity we have experienced must prompt financial institutions and regulators alike to undertake unsparing self-assessment of their past performance,” the Fed chief said.

Bernanke, 55, has taken heat for failing to detect early signs of the housing collapse. Lax regulatory oversight by the Fed and others was blamed for contributing to the crisis.

“The Fed has done a horrible job as a regulator,” said the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.

“We didn’t do a perfect job by any means,” Bernanke acknowledged. But he added: “We didn’t do the worst job” either.

Bernanke acknowledged that lapses were made.

“I did not anticipate a crisis of this magnitude, this severity,” Bernanke said. Many banks weren’t adequately prepared and lacked sufficient capital buffers against losses. “That is a mistake we won’t make again.”

At the same time, Bernanke argued that the Fed must remain “effective and independent” to make decisions that may be good for the economy but unpopular with politicians or the public. That was directed at a provision — passed by a House committee on Wednesday — that would subject the notoriously secretive Fed to congressional audits. Bernanke fears that could interfere with crucial decisions about interest rates.

Bernanke said the Fed stands ready — when the time is right — to reverse course and start boosting interest rates to prevent inflation from flaring up. As part of that process, the Fed would need to soak up an unprecedented amount of money — trillions of dollars — it poured into the economy during the crisis.

“We are confident that we have the necessary tools to do so,” Bernanke said. He didn’t say when the Fed would start raising rates, although private economists think that will happen late next year.

The central bank’s forceful and aggressive actions prevented the devastating crisis from getting even worse, Bernanke said.

Drawing on lessons learned as a scholar of the Great Depression, Bernanke rolled out a slew of bold and unprecedented programs to help ease credit clogs and spur lending. He coordinated emergency relief actions with central banks overseas. He slashed a key lending rate to a record low near zero.

Those steps — along with a $787 billion stimulus package — eventually helped pull the country out of recession. The economy has now entered a fragile recovery.

Even so, it probably won’t be strong enough to stop the unemployment rate — now at a 26-year high of 10.2 percent — from rising into 2010, Fed officials and private economists say. And that poses a threat to lawmakers in next year’s congressional elections.

Bernanke said it is too early to decide whether additional government aid is needed to bolster the recovery and spur job creation. The White House was holding a summit Thursday to explore new ideas to get Americans back to work.

Some senators and others also worry that the Fed’s super-low rates could feed a new speculative bubble.

Bernanke told lawmakers he didn’t see any bubbles at this point in the U.S. He also said it is not the United States’ “responsibility” to prevent speculative bubbles in other parts of the world.

Regulation would be the first line of defense against bubbles forming, said Bernanke, who didn’t rule out using higher interest rates to pop them. The Fed is keeping watch, monitoring major credit and stock markets to look for “misalignments,” he said.

The biggest sore point with the public — and their representatives — was the government’s bailout of Wall Street, even as ordinary Americans suffered. The multibillion-dollar bailouts of American International Group Inc. and other financial firms that continued to hand out huge bonuses sparked fury. They also fueled worries that the Fed’s moves would encourage further reckless bets by companies.

“You are the definition of a moral hazard,” huffed Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., the only senator who opposed Bernanke’s confirmation four years ago and said he’ll do so again.

Moreover, the government may be reluctant to let them repay until they’re confident that no further assistance will be needed. If the economy were to seriously weaken again, the government could be forced to inject more money into big banks.

Bank of America Corp. said Thursday it has raised $19.29 billion from a securities offering that, along with available cash, will be used to repay the money it received during the height of the credit crisis last year. It would become the first of seven companies that received “exceptional” government assistance — bailout funds beyond the initial injections from the Troubled Asset Relief Program — to pay back taxpayers in full.

In doing so, Bank of America would join JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group as large banks that have cut ties with the government — and broken free of limits on executive compensation and other restrictions. While those banks also have had steep loan losses, they’ve been able to offset much of the damage with strong profits in their trading divisions.

Bank of America in particular has been aided by profit from its wealth management business, which includes the bank’s Merrill Lynch division.

The TARP repayment helps the Charlotte, N.C., bank’s efforts to recruit a successor to CEO Ken Lewis, who announced last fall that he planned to retire on Dec. 31.

But it also widens the competitive gap between banks that have repaid TARP funds and those that haven’t, said Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker at J.P. Morgan who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“It puts more pressure on Citigroup and Wells to pay it back when they can — which is good,” Elliott said. “We want them to be under pressure to act.”

Like other big banks, Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. have been beset by losses on loans from mortgages to credit cards as a growing number of consumers struggle to pay off debt. Citigroup reported $8 billion in loan losses in the third quarter compared with $5.1 billion for Wells Fargo.

Citigroup has received $45 billion in federal aid and guarantees to protect against losses on more than $300 billion in risky assets. In return, the government got a 34 percent ownership stake in the banking giant.

Wells Fargo has received $25 billion in aid. Neither bank has given a timetable for repaying taxpayers.

Wells Fargo “will work closely with our regulators to determine the appropriate time to repay the government’s investment … while maintaining strong capital levels,” spokeswoman Julia Tunis Bernard said.

“The offer was stated in dollars,” Bastian told reporters at a Tokyo hotel. “That’s not enough to change our offer,” he said in acknowledging the dollar’s recent weakness. It fell to a 14-year low against the yen last week.

American has been working aggressively to try to keep Japan Airlines in its oneworld alliance. American’s chief financial officer is scheduled to speak to reporters here later in the day.

American, a unit of AMR Corp., which is based in Fort Worth, Texas, has said that if JAL switches from the oneworld alliance it will cost the Japanese carrier up to $500 million in lost revenue in the first two years after the changeover.

JAL President Haruka Nishimatsu has said he will make a decision by the end of the year.

American officials have argued that if JAL sticks with them they could both apply for antitrust immunity from U.S. and Japanese regulators and bring in up to $100 million a year in additional revenue.

Such a tie-up would depend on U.S. and Japanese governments striking a so-called open skies agreement that would reduce barriers to airlines from one country operating in the other.

Delta’s lawyer said if JAL decides to join the SkyTeam alliance they could also win antitrust immunity.

“A JAL-Delta alliance would pose no threat to competition,” said Jeffrey Shane, a partner at Hogan & Hartson, who appeared with Bastian at the news conference.

“It’s my view that JAL and Delta have an excellent case for ATI,” or antitrust immunity, said Shane, who has 26 years experience at the Department of Transportation and now serves as Delta’s adviser.

Japan Airlines has been teetering for years, hammered by surging fuel prices, global competition and an image problem caused by a series of safety lapses.

It had been losing Japanese customers to its local rival All Nippon Airways. It has obtained government loans in recent weeks to avoid grounding flights.