Flirting with socialism?

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The government put itself four-square into the country's banking business Tuesday, resorting to what President Bush conceded was the unwelcome choice of buying into the system to loosen paralyzed channels of credit.

The president said the decision to buy shares in the nation's leading banks -- a kind of federal intervention not seen since the Depression era -- was "not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it."

But the administration was clearly conflicted by the action.

Said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: "We regret having to take these actions. Today's actions are not what we ever wanted to do -- but today's actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system."

At a news conference last month, Bush defended his administration's increasingly aggressive market interventions to deal with the biggest upheavals on Wall Street in seven decades.

"I'm sure there are some of my friends out there saying, I thought this guy was a market guy; what happened to him?," he said. "Well, my first instinct wasn't to lay out a huge government plan. My first instinct was to let the market work until I realized, upon being briefed by the experts, of how significant this problem became."