WASHINGTON — Fear and foreboding took hold on Wall Street yesterday, as the stock market again plunged and investors became convinced that the nation is on the verge of a deep and prolonged recession.

President Bush, who has said little publicly during this week's prolonged market dive, was scheduled to make a statement about the crisis today in the Rose Garden, the White House said. He also will meet with finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries — the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada — tomorrow.

"The president will have the opportunity to hear directly from the finance ministers about how the financial crisis is affecting their respective economies and the steps they are taking to deal with these challenges, both individually and collectively," press secretary Dana Perino said.

Perino said Bush would "assure the American people that they should be confident that economic officials are aggressively taking every action to stabilize our financial system."

And continuing its efforts to stanch the damage, the Bush administration yesterday said it is working on a plan to inject government cash into some of the nation's troubled banks. It may brief congressional leaders as early as today.

Meanwhile, global economic policymakers are planning to gather in Washington today for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings, and will try to find coordinated responses.

Yesterday the Dow Jones industrials plunged 679 points. Stocks lost more than 7 percent, $872 billion of investments evaporated, and the Dow fell to 8,579. When the average crashed through the 9,000 level for the first time in five years in the final hour of trading, sellers had only begun to hit the gas pedal.

As bad as the day was, even worse was the cumulative effect of a historic run of declines: The Dow suffered a triple-digit loss for the sixth day in a row, a first, and the average dropped for the seventh day in a row, a losing streak not seen since 2002.

"Right now the market is just panicked," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. "Nobody wants to take on any risk. Everybody just wants to get their money and put it under the mattress."

But the plummeting stock market could not be blamed on any single piece of horrible news — there were no additional bank failures or government bailouts or corporate bankruptcies.

"I've never seen a panic like this," Wyss said. "I've seen stock market drops, but not an overall panic."

After yesterday, stocks are on track for their worst calendar year since 1937.

And uncertainty could be the rule on Wall Street again today, especially for investors watching for signs of an economic slowdown. General Electric, a bellwether for both the industrial and financial sectors of the economy, is due to report its third-quarter earnings.

'DOMINO EFFECT'

Fear from Wall Street flooded into Asia today, where markets were dramatically lower in early trading. Japan's benchmark Nikkei average plunged nearly 10 percent, Australia markets slid more than 7 percent and South Korea stocks were down about 8 percent.

"It's a domino effect. Stocks are falling out of bed. There is distrust in the market and distrust in the government that is trying to heal this," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist with New York-based Avalon Partners.

Investors pulled a record $72 billion out of stock and bond mutual funds in September, the research firm TrimTabs said yesterday, and in the past week alone took out $52 billion.

While the stock market was the most visible sign of the distress, a more significant one may have been a rise in interest rates for short-term lending among banks. The spike came despite Wednesday's cut in the target interest rate of the world's major central banks, suggesting that banks are more fearful than ever of lending to each other.

Credit markets provided modest good news, however, as the interest rates dropped on commercial paper, a form of debt that companies use to finance short-term cash flow. The Federal Reserve announced a new program to take on that debt Tuesday morning.

Some of the worst damage was in U.S. automakers. J.D. Power and Associates said that the global auto industry may experience an "outright collapse" in 2009. Then the S&P Ratings Agency put General Motors debt on a credit watch.

No stock symbolized the market's dire state yesterday more than General Motors Corp. Shares of the country's largest automaker, long a mainstay of the economy, plummeted 31 percent to $4.76 — their lowest level since the Korean War. Beset by falling auto sales and tightening credit, GM has seen its stock plunge 87 percent in the past year.

Ford stock was down 22 percent.

GROWING ANXIETY

Japan is set to propose to the world's leading industrialized nations that a joint fund be set up to give emergency loans to nations hit by the growing financial crisis, the finance minister said today.

Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said he is set to make the proposal at the Group of Seven meeting of finance and central bank officials that he is attending in Washington.

"Japan would like to see what it can do to work with other countries to ensure ample capital supply," he said on nationally televised NHK news.

He did not give details of the plan. But he said Japan's experience in dealing with its bad debt crisis in the 1990s may offer lessons for the other G-7 nations.

He said he hopes to tell others how Japan injected public money into banks at that time to bolster their capital after the so-called bubble economy of soaring land and stock prices burst and banks got stuck with mountains of bad debt.

Meanwhile, investors have become frustrated that the government's efforts to tackle the financial crisis, including plans to buy up billions in toxic mortgage debt and a global interest rate cut, have yet to loosen the credit markets.

"Everyone applauds (the government efforts). The fearful part is that nothing has taken hold," said Bart Barnett, head of equity trading at Morgan Keegan, based in Memphis, Tenn. "None of it seems to stop the free fall in the market."

The problem seems to be that many of the government actions, such as the $700 billion U.S. financial system bailout passed a week ago, take time to go into effect.

Darker clouds have moved to new parts of the economy. Trouble in sectors like steel production and heavy machinery, which until recently were growing strongly, has contributed to the mounting view that the U.S. economy has tumbled into a significant recession.

Economists now widely predict that the economy will contract until the middle of 2009. If that holds true, it would mark the nation's longest period of economic decline since the downturn that ended in 1975.

"Some time ago we expected a more mild downturn, but this is a pretty serious recession," said Abiel Reinhart, an economist with J.P. Morgan Chase.

The nation is still absorbing steep declines in home construction, an industry that shed 35,000 jobs in August alone. Sales of clothing and shoes are down, as is spending on recreational outlets — including casino trips, nightclubs and sporting events — according to Commerce Department data.

Factory orders were down in August by 3.5 percent, a decline that included products such as computers, pharmaceuticals and iron and steel.