For all the thorny free-market issues raised, the big U.S. intervention in banks does have precedents — from wholesale wartime takeovers of entire industries to the seizing of hundreds of failed savings and loans in the 1980s. Most nationalizations have been temporary, but some endure, such as Amtrak.
The government has taken stakes in banks, railways, steel mills, coal mines and foreclosed homes.
President Bush’s announcement Tuesday that the government would invest up to $250 billion in the nation’s top financial institutions was the latest step in increasingly bold efforts here and abroad to prop up a financial system near collapse.
During World War I, the feds nationalized railroads, telegraph lines and the Smith & Wesson Co. In World War II, it seized railroads, coal mines, trucking operators and many other companies — and, briefly, retailer Montgomery Ward.
Not all takeover efforts go through. President Truman tried to nationalize the steel industry in 1952 to avert a strike he claimed would hurt Korean War efforts. But the Supreme Court stopped him. The Associated Press
