NBC was the only network to assign its White House correspondent to the policy response to the financial crisis. David Gregory repeated the rap on President George Bush--"the administration missed the warning signs of the financial unraveling and has been slow to take corrective steps"--before previewing the weekend's meetings in Washington between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the six finance ministers representing the G7 group of other industrialized nations. Gregory ticked off their to-do list: inject capital in failing banks; free up trading in short-term commercial paper; shore up the real estate mortgage market.
CBS followed up with a trio of correspondents from world capitals. Richard Roth in London heard a broker recommend the "kitchen sink" strategy--"throw absolutely everything they have at the problem." Barry Petersen (at the tail of the Roth videostream) was in Tokyo, from where he observed "the meltdown was relentless" across Asia. Nancy Cordes was in Washington, where she advised us to disregard the selloff on Wall Street as "just a sideshow." The real crisis, she pointed out, was the breakdown in interbank lending. The British government decided two days ago to inject funds into its banks by buying a nationalized stake in London's major houses. Cordes called that "the nuclear option," before suggesting that similar nationalization might be pursued by the United States.
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