"The United States government is acting. We will continue to act to resolve this crisis and restore stability to our markets," President George Bush said as finance ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries gathered in Washington on Friday.
Commenting on the meeting, which focused on adopting swift measures to stabilize financial systems, Bush said: "Through these efforts, the world is sending an unmistakable signal. We're in this together and we'll come through this together."
However, he also sounded a more somber note, saying that, "Uncertainty has led to anxiety among our people. And that is understandable, that anxiety can feed anxiety, and that can make it hard to see all that is being done to solve the problem."
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $700 billion bailout bill, introducing a host of new measures, including a clause to raise the government's guarantee on savings from $100,000 to $250,000.
The economic stabilization plan, the largest in the country's history, was intended to give the U.S. administration powers to buy devalued mortgage-related assets held by struggling financial companies and banks.
The plan, designed to prevent the current crisis from spreading to the entire U.S. economy, was designed after a wave of defaults among U.S. financial institutions, including the failure of investment bank Lehman Brothers and the Washington Mutual bank, and the government's $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG.
