Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Group of Seven finance chiefs, meeting after stocks plunged and as a global recession looms, vowed to prevent the failure of vital banks while failing to unveil new initiatives for thawing credit markets.
``The current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action,'' the finance ministers and central bankers said in a statement after talks in Washington yesterday. They pledged to ``take all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets'' without detailing how that would be accomplished.
Signaling they would intervene to avoid a repeat of last month's collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the officials promised to ensure major banks have access to cash and are able to tap public funds for capital. [...]
Measures taken should protect taxpayers and avoid ``potentially damaging effects on other countries,'' the group said. In the past month, European countries have taken unilateral actions to increase bank-deposit guarantees, spurring concern that savers would drain cash from nations with less protection.
Paulson said it would be ``naive'' to think that different nations in different circumstances could come up with the same policy paths. [...]
Paulson signaled his top priority is getting his plan to buy financial stocks running as soon as he can. ``This is a plan that I'm quite confident will work,'' he said. The Treasury chief also said ``we have more to do in the liquidity area.''
The American plan follows U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's 50 billion pound ($87 billion) program that will partly nationalize at least eight lenders. [...]
Trichet will head to Paris for a summit of European leaders tomorrow that French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said will seek to go ``beyond'' the G-7's agreements. [...]
The G-7 promised to implement ``high-quality accounting standards.''