G7 PLAN - WILL IT BE ENOUGH?

Global leaders pledge to sort out financial crisis but is it too little too late?

the Australian has a good take on the G7 meeting but their plan has not met with universal approval.

Read more here at the Australian


THE G7 nations have pledged to prevent big banks from collapse and to work together to stem the financial crisis."The current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action," finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations said following their meeting in Washington. They pledged to use "all available tools," but did not announce specific measures.
Reeling from the loss of trillions of dollars of wealth, investors worldwide had pinned their hopes on decisive action from the G7. US stocks pared massive losses in a late recovery after a day of sharp moves.
And US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, warning that the United States was facing a prolonged period of uncertainty, said Washington was developing plans to purchase equity stakes in financial institutions.
Japan's finance minister also said that Japan was considering injecting capital into banks.
Such moves would be similar to measures that Britain has announced to put money into struggling banks.
The G7, meanwhile, said it would work to get financing flowing.
"We commit to continue working together to stabilize financial markets and restore the flow of credit, to support global economic growth," officials of the G7, which includes the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan, said in a statement.
They said that would include using all available tools to prevent "systemically important" financial institutions from failure and to ensure that banks can raise capital from public and private sources.
The G7 stopped short of backing a British plan to guarantee lending between banks, something many on Wall Street saw as a vital step to end 14 months of turmoil and rising panic over recent weeks.
"The markets wanted maybe more assurance that there would be a unified global backstopping of the banks, and it doesn't sound like that's in there," said Kim Rupert, managing director of global fixed income analysis at Action Economics LLC in San Franciso. "This week has been absolutely brutal. ... If this is the extent of it from G7, then we could be in for more trouble on Monday."
Enrique Alvarez, head of Latin America debt strategy at Ideaglobal in New York, said he was disappointed.
"I think they had to come with a much stronger commitment in order to tackle the freeze in the credit market and the absolute lack of confidence in the G7 government leadership by the markets, equities in particular," he said.