U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss says he isn’t sure whether the $850 billion financial bailout package Congress passed last week will work. But the Georgia Republican says he’s confident he did the right thing in voting for it.

“I will assure you that (fellow Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson) and I both talked to dozens of bankers around the state. We talked to economists. We talked to business people. We talked to folks in the academic world. Everybody agreed that something had to be done. But then when you follow that up, you said, ‘What is it we need to do?’ They said, ‘Gosh, I don’t know,’” he said.

Chambliss spoke Tuesday at a Washington update breakfast at the Dalton Golf and Country Club hosted by the Dalton-Whitfield Chamber of Commerce.

Chambliss said the stock market’s 700-point plunge after the House of Representatives voted down the bill on its first try was a vote of no confidence. But he denied that world markets’ turbulence after the bill passed marked a similar lack of confidence.

“The stock market reacts to different transactions or different reports or different activities. But there’s no question that when the stock market went down on Sept. 29 it was in direct reaction to the House vote on the financial rescue package. No question about that,” he said. “(Monday) when the market went down, it was a reaction, but it was not a reaction to the bailout bill. It was a reaction to what was going on worldwide.”

Chambliss said he was not surprised by the nation’s financial problems. He said Congress has been warned about them for years. But he said he was surprised by how large they were, and he said the cost of the bailout bill shocked him.

Chambliss said he laid down certain conditions that had to be met before he would support the bailout bill. Among them was that “every single dime that is paid back by a borrower whose loan we purchase goes to retire the debt that we use to purchase these bonds.”

“Will we get 100 percent of the money back that we put into this program? None of us can answer that question today,” he said.

But Chambliss said he believes the government can make money on the bailout because the loans will be bought at a significant discount.

Chambliss also spoke on energy policy, saying the United States needs to work towards energy independence.

“I hope that the next president will demand that Congress get together in a bipartisan way and move towards developing a plan that will move us towards energy independence,” he said.