After going it alone in taking emergency action to bail out banks and assure savers, European governments promised to talk daily in future and “ensure a comprehensive and coordinated response to the current situation,” they said in a statement.

“We are not going to tolerate a Lehman Brothers scenario,” said French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who led the talks, referring to the U.S. investment bank whose bankruptcy set off a chain of losses at other institutions.

But the EU failed to agree on a minimum bank guarantee of euro100,000 — five times the current EU minimum of euro20,000 — because some smaller and poorer nations feared they could not cover such an amount. Countries can, of course, go beyond the EU minimum and many already have.

EU governments have been trying to restore confidence after a eries of bank bailouts last week and a cascade of individual moves by countries to increase deposit guarantees, in some cases to 100 percent of deposits. Markets plunged Monday on fears a US$700 billion bank bailout would not be enough.

Banks have frozen lending to each other, while central banks have had to push short term credit into the banking system to keep it going. On Tuesday, the European Central Bank offered $50 billion for a second day in a row.

Treasury chief Alistair Darling and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King reportedly met with the heads of Britain’s biggest banks to discuss possible government plans to inject as much as 50 billion pounds (US$87 billion) into the institutions.

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