President Bush warned Tuesday that the financial crisis cannot be solved overnight, but he said the U.S. economy is resilient and expressed confidence it will rebound in the long run.

Despite that confidence, bad news came from Capitol Hill, the president’s own Federal Reserve chairman and Wall Street, where the Dow closed down more than 500 points.

Bush noted that while his administration is “aggressively” implementing the rescue package Congress passed last week, the “frozen” credit will “take awhile to get it unstuck.”

“Thawing the freeze in the financial system is not going to happen overnight, but it will be a process that unfolds over several stages,” Bush said.

The current economic crisis has already caused some $2 trillion to vanish from the pension and private retirement system, according to Dr. Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s a drop of 20 percent in the non-Social Security retirement savings available to every American with either a pension plan or a 401(k) retirement account, Orszag told the House Education and Labor Committee. The committee held a hearing Tuesday on the impact of the economic slump on the retirement security of Americans.

And most people won’t see just how much their retirement accounts have actually dropped for a few months, Orszag said.

“The numbers are staggering,” said Dr. Christian Weller, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, who also testified.

“Where do they turn to make this recovery?” Education and Labor panel Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) asked. “To spend less? We already know that they’re taking out huge amounts of debt just to stay even.”

Orszag said the only options available for those close to retiring are either to spend less now — which he said would only add to an almost certain recession — spend less upon retirement or retire later, which he predicted millions of Americans may be forced to do.

Before the president tried to bolster “faith” in the economy, the White House avoided using the word “recession” and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned the financial crisis is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Bernanke, speaking to the National Association for Business Economics, said that the increasing credit squeeze and its trickle-down effect on small businesses and families could “pose a significant threat to economic growth.”