Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York. Shares in American International Group plummeted more than 50 percent Monday on fears the US insurance giant could be the next domino to fall in the worst banking crisis to shake Wall Street since the Great Depression.[AFP]

The new measures include broadening the types of assets that investment banks can put up to get emergency loans from the Fed. The Fed would also increase the frequency of some of the auctions being used to get loans to banks from every other week to every week.

Earlier, a global consortium of banks have announced a 70 billion US dollar pool of funds to lend to troubled financial companies. The aim of the bank consortium was to prevent a worldwide panic on stock and other financial exchanges.

Ten banks - Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS - each agreed to provide seven billion US dollars.

(CCTV September 17, 2008)