Bush pushes bailout plan

President George W. Bush will press for agreement on a massive bailout of U.S. financial firms on Thursday in an emergency meeting with lawmakers, including the two men battling to succeed him.
The emergency White House meeting takes place after top U.S. industrial conglomerate General Electric Co cut its earnings forecast, citing "unprecedented weakness and volatility" in the financial services market, and new data added to concerns about the weak U.S. economy.
Market turmoil and the demise of Wall Street icons such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc led to the $700 billion bailout plan as global markets faced their worst crisis since the Great Depression. Central banks have pumped billions of dollars into financial markets to try to ease the credit crunch.
Just weeks before Americans go to the polls to elect their next president, critics have expressed concern that a bailout will let freewheeling bankers get off too lightly, and doubts have surfaced over whether the plan can solve the wider credit crisis.
Despite fierce debate over the plan in Washington, there were signals that a deal was in the works.
Rep. Paul Kanjorski, chairman of the House of Representatives capital markets subcommittee, told CNBC television there was "tremendous progress" on the plan and that an agreement was "almost an accomplished fact."
He said he hoped lawmakers can work through the weekend to "get this out of the way" and that the package would include measures to slow the pace of home foreclosures and limit executive pay at companies that offload bad assets.
The $700 billion would be used to buy up toxic mortgage-related securities held by financial firms. The U.S. housing market slump sent the value of those securities plummeting. Companies holding the securities have already taken billions of dollars of write-downs.
Signs of a possible breakthrough on the rescue package, which aims to stave off a widespread financial meltdown, gave beleaguered U.S. stocks a boost.