The world's financial system was near meltdown, the IMF warned as European leaders meeting in Paris on Sunday detailed measures for a coordinated financial rescue package before markets open on Monday morning. The Sunday Times newspaper said Britain will launch its biggest retail bank rescue on Monday when the four largest, HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays, ask for a combined 35 billion pound ($60.5 billion) lifeline. Meanwhile, Australia, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates became the latest countries to guarantee all deposits in domestic banks. Japan and South Korea agreed to push ahead with plans for a foreign exchange pool to be used in the event of an Asian financial crisis, reports said. The International Monetary Fund said it backed a Group of Seven plan to try to stabilize markets and urged “exceptional vigilance, coordination and readiness to take bold action” to contain a firestorm that pushed global stocks to five-year lows on Friday. European leaders were discussing on Sunday how to restore credit availability, with a British initiative to guarantee lending between banks as one of the topics. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meeting in France, said they had “prepared a certain number of decisions” to present at the European summit on Sunday to try to restore normal flows in blocked credit markets. France's Economy Minister, Christine Lagarde, said the 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.” In an interview with the Observer newspaper, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he will try to broker a Europe-wide bail-out of banks modelled on Britain's intervention, warning that the “stakes could not be higher” for jobs, mortgages and the future of the economy, the paper said. The Sunday Times said the scale of the fund-raising could lead to trading at the London Stock Exchange being suspended to give the market time to digest the impact. The United States appealed for patience but the IMF said time was short after the Group of Seven industrialized nations failed to agree on concrete measures to end the crisis at a meeting on Friday. “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,” IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said. 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. “In the coming days ... what I expect is that the reaction by the different institutions will be positive enough to unfreeze the different markets and to restore the necessary funding,” he said at a news conference. The G7 met on Friday and then joined key emerging-market nations for a meeting of the Group of 20 on Saturday. Emerging economies including China, Brazil, India and South Africa now are feeling the impact of the market slump. US President George W. Bush made a surprise appearance at the G20 where he acknowledged the market disruption originated in US mortgage markets but warned everyone must help to resolve it. “It doesn't matter if you're a rich country or a poor country, a developed country or a developing country -- we're all in this together. We must work collaboratively,” he said.
