On September 17, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke advised Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson that a large amount of public money would be needed to stabilize the financial system.[41] Short selling on 799 financial stocks was banned on September 19. Companies were also forced to disclose large short positions.[42] The Secretary of the Treasury also indicated that money market funds will create an insurance pool to cover themselves against losses and that the government will buy mortgage-backed securities from banks and investment houses.[42] Initial estimates of the cost of the Treasury bailout proposed by the Bush Administration's draft legislation (as of September 19, 2008) were in the range of $700 billion[43] to $1 trillion U.S. dollars.[44] President George W. Bush asked Congress on September 20, 2008 for the authority to spend as much as $700 billion to purchase troubled mortgage assets and contain the financial crisis.[45][46] The crisis continued when the United States House of Representatives rejected the bill and the Dow Jones took a 777 point plunge.[47] A revised version of the bill was later passed by Congress, but the stock market continued to fall nevertheless.[48] [49]

As of mid-November, it was estimated that the new loans, purchases, and liabilities of the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, and FDIC, brought on by the financial crisis, totalled over $5 trillion: $1 trillion in loans by the Fed to broker-dealers through the emergency discount window, $1.8 trillion in loans by the Fed through the Term Auction Facility, $700 billion to be raised by the Treasury for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, $200 billion insurance for the GSEs by the Treasury, and $1.5 trillion insurance for unsecured bank debt by FDIC.[50] (Some portion of the Fed's emergency loans would already have been repaid.)