Bush calls for calm amid global stock market panic

By Jeremy Pelofsky and Daniel Trotta

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warning that "anxiety can feed anxiety," U.S. President George W. Bush implored Americans to remain confident on Friday and promised to restore stability in the face of a global stock market panic.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven, meeting in Washington, faced mounting pressure to repair the system after joint interest-rate cuts, individual liquidity injections, a $700 billion U.S. bailout and government plans to take equity stakes in banks failed to restore investor confidence.

The policy makers were considering their remaining options while experts offered their own proposals.

Much of the debate surrounded injecting capital into banks to keep them from failing. The U.S Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the White House were in consultations on how to do it, CNBC reported, citing senior government officials.

The White House declined to comment.

"There's no confidence -- there's an atom or two of confidence returning," said market strategist Steve Goldman at Weeden & Co in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Bush spoke in a televised address ahead of the G7 meeting to confront the frozen credit markets and recessionary signals underlying the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

"We know what the problems are. We have the tools to fix them. And we're working swiftly to do so," Bush said after Wall Street opened with an 8 percent slide in the Dow Jones Industrial Average before trimming those losses in half.