Leaders meet for Paris crisis talks

European leaders are meeting in Paris to discuss measures to prevent market panic from triggering the most severe global downturn in decades. The Group of Seven industrialised nations launched a plan to try to stabilise markets on Saturday but the group failed to agree on concrete measures to end the crisis. The launch of the G7 plan was backed by the International Monetary Fund but it warned the world's financial system was near meltdown and called for swift action. IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said: "Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest US-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown." Mr Strauss-Kahn later expressed hope that government actions will prove powerful enough to persuade banks to resume lending and bring an end to a spreading credit crunch. France's Economy Minister, Christine Lagarde, said the European leaders' gathering would go beyond talking about remedies to "put meat, muscles on the bones of that skeleton and to develop, follow up and execute upon it." US President George W Bush met with G7 economic chiefs and officials from the IMF and World Bank and said top industrial nations would work together to solve the crisis. He said: "I'm confident that the world's major economies can overcome the challenges we face." Prime Minister Gordon Brown has told a newspaper he will try to broker a Europe-wide bail-out of banks modelled on Britain's intervention at the European leaders' meeting. Britain's rescue plan, launched last week, makes available £50 billion pounds of taxpayers' money for injection into its banks and calls for underwriting interbank lending, which has all but frozen around the globe. Australia and New Zealand have become the latest countries to guarantee bank deposits.

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ITN | October 12, 2008

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