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US President Barack Obama is poised to call on Congress to approve an overhaul of the US regulatory regime.In a speech to mark one year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank, he will also mount a vigorous defence of his administration's economic policies. The US president will focus on "the need to take the next series of steps" in regulatory reform, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. Mr Obama's team have argued that they staved off a second Great Depression. Mr Obama will give his speech at 1210 local time (1610 GMT) in New York, at Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington was inaugurated as the first US president. It comes a week before the US hosts a summit of the Group of 20 richest nations in Pittsburgh. The White House has said its massive $787bn (�472bn) stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed earlier this year, has created up to 1.1m jobs and boosted economic activity. "When I walked in, the banking system, the financial system was under the verge of collapse," Mr Obama said on Sunday in an interview on the 60 Minutes television show. "The reason we did so was that every credible Democratic and Republican economist at the time when we came in said if we don't have a stimulus of some sort, then this is potentially going to get a lot worse," he said. Some opinion polls have showed that most Americans believe the stimulus plan is having no impact. The White House has said it boosted US GDP by 2-3% between April and June. Recent data has suggested that the US is starting to recover, just as other countries such as Japan ad Germany have left recession. Many economists believe that the US will return to positive economic growth in the June-September quarter. "When the president was elected and in transition, the issue... was whether recession would become depression," said Lawrence Summers, head of the Obama administration's National Economic Council. "Today, the question is when the recession phase will end? That is not, in our judgement, an accident." "We are making a clear transition from rescue as the priority of public policy to sustained recovery," he added. The collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers, soon after troubled rival Bear Sterns was sold with Federal Reserve intervention, marked the start of a near-total collapse of the financial system that required unprecedented global intervention to keep it solvent.