Bush pledges unity with finance leaders

The president met with world financial leaders to convey an attitude of cooperation on the world economic crisis.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush and the world’s financial leaders staged repeated displays of unity Saturday to combat an unfolding credit crisis, hoping to calm investors whose panic has spread despite bold and accelerating government action.

Though there were no concrete offers of new moves made Saturday, Bush pledged anew that his administration was doing everything possible to halt the biggest market disruptions since the Great Depression, and the finance ministers spoke in unusually somber terms about the need for action.

Bush, who had started the day shortly after daybreak with a Rose Garden appearance with finance ministers from the world’s richest countries, made an unexpected late-day visit to the headquarters of the 185-nation International Monetary Fund. With Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, he participated in a discussion with the Group of 20, which includes rich countries and major developing nations such as China, Brazil and India.

That session was an information exchange so that the rich nations could review the efforts they are pursuing to stem a prolonged credit crisis that began with a meltdown of the market for subprime mortgages in the United States in the summer of 2007.

The financial turmoil dominated discussions at the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank over the weekend. The IMF strongly endorsed a five-point plan put together by the G-7 nations the day before that pledged to use all means possible to prevent major financial institutions from failing and to keep pumping money into the banking system to unfreeze lending and get credit — the lifeblood of the economy — flowing again.

“The depth and systemic nature of the crisis call for exceptional vigilance, coordination and readiness to take bold action,” the IMF said in its joint statement. That statement, in an unusual move, repeated verbatim all of the commitments made in the G-7 statement that had been released Friday.

“There is a resolve that this crisis will be resolved, that no tools will be spared to address this issue,” Egypt’s finance minister, Youseff Boutros Ghali, chairman of the IMF’s policy panel, told a news conference late Saturday.

In his Rose Garden appearance, Bush made a plea for nations to work together to address the crisis, avoiding the go-it-alone protectionist trade strategies that worsened conditions during the Great Depression.

“In an interconnected world, no nation will gain by driving down the fortunes of another. We are in this together. We will come through it together,” Bush said. “There have been moments of crisis in the past when powerful nations turned their energies against each other or sought to wall themselves off from the world. This time is different.”