US President Barack Obama's economic team is pouring over options for tackling the financial crisis, which has raised fresh fears about the health of leading banks around the world.
Below is a summary of some of the possible ways forward for the administration of Mr Obama:
The US government could create a "bad" bank, or possibly more than one, to hold potentially hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of "toxic" mortgage-based and other hard-to-sell assets acquired from commercial banks.
Backers of the "aggregator bank" idea say commercial banks relieved of bad assets would be more attractive to investors and less wary of resuming lending to companies and investors, helping avoid the risk of a long recession.
When the US government first proposed a similar idea last year, before focusing instead on buying stakes in banks, one challenge was seen as how to settle on prices for buying assets from banks. Buy them too cheaply and the banks will have to report more losses, threatening their financial health again; paying too much for them would waste taxpayers' money.
Another problem is the potentially large sums needed to fund such an operation. Investors, including the central banks of China and Japan, fund America's deficits by buying its bonds and need to remain confident about its public finances.
The bad banks could be leveraged up with private money but many experts say it is unclear if the remaining half of the government's $700 billion financial rescue plan would cover the bad banks option and other parts of the rescue push.
Mr Obama's team could also place the bad assets with existing, specialized private fund managers, a person familiar with the team's thinking said on Saturday.
The bad bank idea is similar to the Resolution Trust Corp set up in 1989 to dispose of bad assets of failing thrift banks. But this time, the government could plan to hold the assets for longer in the hope of recouping value for taxpayers.
Washington has already promised to guarantee potential losses of some of the biggest US banks that could yet be incurred by their bad assets, and the idea could be deployed again by Mr Obama's economic team.
In November, the Treasury helped guarantee up to $306 billion in risky assets held by Citigroup and last week it did the same for more than $100 billion at Bank of America.
However, setting up these loan guarantees on a case-by-case basis may be more complicated than establishing a bad bank. And a bad bank would have the advantage of dealing with assets that may yet go sour with the economy in a downturn.
Some economists also say new loss guarantees might be less effective in terms of convincing investors that radical action is being taken to tackle the root of the crisis.
Despite the Treasury agreeing last year to pump $250 billion into banks to help shore up their finances, further capital injections are expected to be in the plans of Mr Obama's economic team.
Many banks, battered by losses and plunging share prices, have had to turn to the US government as their investor of last resort.
Some countries in Europe have either fully or partially nationalized some big lenders in a bid to stave off potentially devastating bank collapses.
The US government is already a big shareholder in some leading banks including Citigroup but few investors think it is likely to take them over completely and will effectively nationalise their bad loans instead.
However, Mr Obama's team is likely to use its influence as a powerful shareholder in banks to press them to lend more and clamp down on huge pay and bonus packages to top executives.