US government forced banks to take loans to avoid collapse

Former president George W Bush's administration essentially forced the country's top banks to take emergency loans from the government in order to avoid a collapse of the US financial sector last October, according to documents released Wednesday.
Bush's treasury secretary Henry Paulson, at an October 13 meeting, told chief executives of nine banks that they would have no choice but to participate in a lending programme that would allow the government to take equity stakes in the firms.
The government's bail-out, which was considered critical to stabilising the financial industry, has been hugely unpopular with the US public. But the documents reinforce the argument by some on Wall Street that it was the Bush administration - not banks - that pushed for hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency loans.