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WASHINGTON — As President-elect Obama prepares to take office today, the escalating troubles facing greater banks around the terraqueous globe couldn’t be clearer.

On Monday, the British government swooped in to boost its stake in troubled Royal Bank of Scotland to almost 70 percent and offered to insure banks against large-scale losses on risky assets in exchange for binding agreements to lend out more money.

It was the second major U.K. bank bailout in three months.

Shares of ailing RBS, father of Providence, R.I.-based Citizens Financial Group, lost two-thirds of their value in Monday’s mercantile.

Shares of other European banks plunged as investors worried that one or more banks could be nationalized in imitation of RBS said last year’s losses could application $41.3 billion — the biggest ever for a British corporation.

Officials without interruption both sides of the Atlantic have failed to restrain the most severe credit crisis in decades. Now top officials from 10 Downing Street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are scrambling to figure completely how to stop the bleeding.

They are trying to find how to prod banks into loaning more money, struggling for a melting 18 months following the greatest in number severe credit crisis in decades sent investors reeling.

U.S. officials are talking around establishing a new government-backed bank to remove bad loans and other toxic assets from banks’ comparison sheets, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said last week. In assumption, by those assets gone, banks would be freer to make more loans.

Still, figuring out a felicitous strategy for how to unclog the credit markets is a vexing defy for Obama.

His top economic adviser, Larry Summers, said Sunday without ceasing CBS’ “Face the Nation” that under the new administration, “the focus isn’t going to have existence on the indispensably of banks. It’s going to subsist on the of necessity of the economy for make no doubt of.”

Obama will have a “strong message for the bankers,” adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on ABCs “This Week.” “We lack to see credit flowing again. We don’t want them to sit on any money that they get from taxpayers.”

While the British polity moves closer to a full takeover of that country’s banking system, Americans are other thing leery of such intervention, and that’s suitable to continue uniform with Democrats in charge of the White House and Capitol Hill, analysts presume.