Several major central banks cut interest rates together Wednesday, for example, and three European countries joined to save a major cross-border bank Thursday. But getting agreement on a wider scale has proved elusive.
The European Union has created a common currency and gone a long way toward erasing national borders for people and businesses on the continent. But when it took up a proposal to create a pool of money to undergird all the banks in member countries, Germany vetoed the idea because it would not control how its money would be used.
Countries were left to deal with the crisis on their own. The problem with that approach soon became apparent: When Ireland promised to guarantee all deposits in its banks -- and extended the protection Thursday to some foreign-owned banks in the country -- the action angered Britain and other nations that feared cash would drain out of their financial institutions and into the banks in Ireland.
Given the differences that still exist even among developed countries, most experts say no one-size-fits-all approach to the crisis is possible or even desirable.
"I don't think it's necessary that they all have a similar response . . . but the question is: Does the response of Country A create a problem for Country B?" said Nicolas Veron, a research fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank.
And Paulson said, "The key thing is that we continue to work closely together, we continue to communicate, we continue to coordinate."
Those goals have been fairly easy to achieve in the realm of monetary policy, which largely involves interest rates and the supply of money in circulation -- the traditional duties of central banks.
Getting multinational agreement on the broader economic response demanded by the current crisis is harder because it's more political, said Edwin M. Truman, a former official at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.
Doing things like buying up mortgage-backed securities or guaranteeing loans to struggling financial institutions involves taxpayer money and also has political ramifications, said Truman, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Sebastian Mallaby, a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the globalization of finance meant that this credit crisis was different from those of the past.
