Jittery investors awaited the reopening of stock markets — the Dow Jones industrial average just completed its worst week ever, plummeting more than 18 percent — and hoped for bold, coordinated international steps to address the crisis.

At a Paris meeting of European leaders Sunday, countries that use the euro agreed to temporarily guarantee bank refinancing to ease the credit crunch. French President Nicolas Sarkozy it would apply in 15 countries through the end of 2009 and was "not a gift to banks."

The United States has not yet gone that far. But President Bush met at the White House with top global financial leaders on Saturday in a display of unity and said afterward that they had agreed to general principles to combat the crisis. Bush, who had spoken about the crisis for 22 of the past 27 days, went biking at a state park in Maryland on Sunday morning and then kept to a private schedule the rest of the day.

Paulson has indicated the administration will use part of the recent $700 billion bailout Bush signed Oct. 3 to have the government take ownership stakes in banks. The plan has wide support on Capitol Hill, although Democrats pressed for quicker action in spelling out specifics.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., sounded a cautionary note. "That has to be very, very carefully done," he said. "We are a capitalistic system and we don't want to move away with nationalizing the banking system. So anything that's done has to be done on a temporary basis."

This plan and other Paulson moves were supported by three former treasury secretaries.

"This is bigger than the private sector can fix by itself," said James A. Baker III, who served under President Ronald Reagan. Robert Rubin, treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and now an adviser to Barack Obama, said it was important "to be highly, highly proactive."

Lawrence Summers, also a Clinton treasury secretary, said, "Any time you have a problem with trust, you've got to deal with it in a very aggressive way."

The lawmakers and ex-Cabinet officers made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows.