Elizabeth Warren wants to be sure Wall Street gets tough love as it tries to recover from the current financial mess.

Warren, the Harvard law professor appointed to chair the five-person Congressional panel overseeing the $700 bailout fund and the Treasury Department’s management of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), told MSNBC this morning that we must demand that failing or struggling financial institutions come clean about their finances. If they don’t, the nation could face yet another financial crisis.

"There has to be absolute clarity — there can be no doubts about the books," the "bailout watchdog" said. "You’ve got to believe the numbers so we can say ‘hey, these are the banks that are solvent, these are the banks that are not solvent.’"

But there also has to be accountability, insists Warren. It shouldn’ t be out of the question that managers in charge of poisonous funds, or those who encouraged banks’ irresponsible behavior, may have to be fired, and institutions and individuals investigated for their alleged misdeeds. In the average business sector, "somebody pays a price when a business fails," she said. Big banks shouldn’t be an exception.

Never shy about taking the Obama administration to task for not ensuring enough oversight of the bailout package, Warren wondered:

Who would have dreamed if we had been sitting here six months ago, that we would have been talking about putting literally hundreds of  billions of dollars into struggling institutions and that no one would lose their job over it, that no one would be accountable, that there would be no investigations into how this happened?

The Obama administration wants to disclose the financial conditions of the 19 biggest banks in the country, and details of the so-called "stress tests" being done, The New York Times reported today. The hope is that more transparency will boost consumer and banker confidence.

"I am so delighted they’re going to publish the numbers," she said, although she lamented that even she has not seen the details of the stress tests. She only knows what she reads in the media. 

"I want to look at the stress test myself — I want to make sure it’s not a 2 mile per-hour walk on the treadmill," Warren added. "We don’t know the details. If we haven’t learned anything else, we’ve learned that in the money area, details are important."

It’s also vitally important Americans be kept informed of how their taxpayer dollars are being used, she said. If they’re not, then "the decisions that are made, will not be the best made for them."

Watch Warren’s interview below: