PARIS -- European leaders took unprecedented steps late Sunday to try to halt a galloping financial crisis in its tracks, announcing aggressive action to take big stakes in banks and guarantee lending between banks.

European Union members announced they planned to guarantee loans between banks, called inter-bank lending, for up to five years. And they intend to allow member countries to take equity stakes worth billions of dollars in troubled financial institutions.

The action follows by a bit more than a week a historic $700 billion U.S. rescue package for the banking system. Both efforts aim to stop a widening crisis that the International Monetary Fund warned over the weekend had brought the world to the brink of financial collapse.

The leaders of European nations presented their plan, adopted one sketched earlier in the week by Britain as a ''tool kit'' that each country could decide how best to put to use. France, Germany and Italy are all expected to take up the plan formally Monday morning.

''This is a worldwide crisis and, rather than tearing Europe apart, it has in fact brought us closer together,'' said French President Nicolas Sarkozy. ''This is no easy task.'' Legislation is required in France, and Sarkozy expected to enact changes by week's end.

While bold, the European plan has a drawback. There were no figures to indicate how much each country will spend on bank rescues. Those numbers won't be available before Wednesday at the earliest, officials acknowledged.

German newspapers reported on their websites Sunday that Chancellor Angela Merkel will announce a $536 billion plan to rescue Germany's banking system. A week earlier, Merkel resisted calls for a Europe-wide approach.

Otto Fricke, chairman of the budget committee in Germany's parliament, told the Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger that the plan involves $134 billion for injecting capital into troubled banks and another $402 billion to guarantee loans between banks. As in the United States, the rescue of banks is hardly a popular notion, and Sarkozy echoed statements of recent weeks made by President Bush and others.

''We are not handing out gifts to banks,'' Sarkozy said. ``We are enabling banks to operate, because our economy depends on it.''

The action represents a bold move as markets reopen following what in many nations across the globe was the worst week on stock exchanges since the Great Depression. President Bush is expected to comment on the plan Monday morning when he and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi make a statement at the White House Rose Garden.

The plan was announced hours before Asian markets resumed Monday's trading. It showed that after small and often divisive steps in their respective countries, EU members had set aside differences in a bid to boost confidence in the global banking system.

The hasty emergency action is also EU leaders' first such coordinated aggressive move since they adopted a common currency, the Euro, now used by 15 nations.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, himself a former finance minister, informed his European counterparts that on Monday morning Britain would be taking large equity stakes in at least four banks, according to the Times of London. He hopes to inject $85 billion or more into the shaky institutions. According to the Times of London, the British government intends to become the leading shareholder in the Royal Bank of Scotland, or RBS, and the Halifax Bank of Scotland. The British government would take smaller positions in Lloyds and Barclay's, two of the most prestigious English banks.

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