"When bubbles burst, the world is exposed to disaster," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said during talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London.

"No single country can remain immune and address this in isolation. We are sitting in the same boat and we need to all work together," he said.

Wen's comments came as Chinese authorities said 20 million migrant workers had now lost their jobs because of the economic downturn, while France and Taiwan announced massive new stimulus plans for their flagging economies.

Governments in Europe also stepped up their bid to get banks lending again amid a massive global credit crunch. The measures include further injections of state funds, nationalisation of banks and political pressure.

But all eyes remained trained on Washington, where new US President Barack Obama is struggling to push his massive economic stimulus plans through Congress despite trenchant opposition from the Republican Party.

The task was made all the more more urgent by a relentless slew of bad ecnomic data, with the Commerce Department on Monday announcing that US consumer spending fell 1.0 percent in December in a sixth consecutive drop.

"Wall Street remains very concerned over the continuing deterioration in the economy," said Fred Dickson, analyst at financial consultants DA Davidson & Co.

"Wall Street desperately needs good news from some front," he said.

US stocks were mixed in late morning trading, with the Dow Jones down 0.74 percent and the Nasdaq barely up 0.15 percent. All the main European stock markets slid, with London's FTSE 100 index down 1.51 percent in late afternoon.

The dollar gained against the euro on foreign exchange markets however as traders bet that the European Central Bank would cut interest rates later this week and as investors looked for a safe haven from the economic storm.

Among the US worries, Dickson pointed to "huge questions over the size and structure of the proposed Federal economic spending plan ... and the proposed structure of the Treasury plan for use of remaining (bank rescue) funds."

There were mounting questions too over European unity in the crisis as German central bank chief Axel Weber criticised a proposal by Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti for a European bond to raise credit for EU states.

Germany said it would host talks among European leaders ahead of the G20 summit in London while French President Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to be seeking a separate summit of eurozone countries to forge greater unity.

The German government said it was considering bank "nationalisations" and "expropriation" to avoid bankruptcies in the crisis while the Spanish government urged banks to start lending again to relieve the economic pressure.

The Irish government was meanwhile preparing to inject eight billion euros (10 billion dollars) of cash into two ailing banks, the Irish Times reported.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon unveiled new measures as part of the government's 26-billion-euro (33-billion-dollar) economic stimulus plan but the mood remained downbeat.

"I'd be extremely astonished if we have positive growth in 2009, let's be realistic," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters.

But the biggest shock on Monday came from figures coming out of China, the world's third biggest economy after the United States and Japan and an increasingly important player in the unfolding crisis.

China said that about 20 million rural migrants were now out of work -- more than triple the number announced last month -- in an indication that the slowdown was intensifying.

Large numbers of Chinese workers have lost their jobs as global demand for the cheap Chinese consumer goods they make has fallen off sharply, forcing thousands of factories to shut their doors.

The slowdown has added to worries about growing protectionism, with new US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner resuming a long-standing US charge that China keeps its currency artificially low to keep its exports cheap.

Economists say that the exchange rate of the yuan is an issue but warn that US pressure could alienate China, one of America's biggest creditors, in a year when the US needs to raise as much as 2.5 trillion dollars in new debt.

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