Wall Street set to follow global sell-off

Wall Street's woes extend far beyond Main Street and all the way to Law Street - the hulking headquarters of the European Union. But the 27-nation bloc based at Rue de la Loi in Brussels, Belgium, hasn't taken sweeping joint action to deal with the global financial meltdown. Instead, it's essentially left member countries to go it alone with a patchwork of measures aimed at keeping banks afloat. Frustrated investors want to know why, and some have begun to question whether the EU - at its core, an economic union - will survive. Although the EU pledged to act as one to calm roiled markets, it hasn't done much beyond a move Tuesday to boost guarantees on savings accounts.

That's led member states to take an a la carte approach, with major economic powerhouses like Britain and Germany putting together rescue packages, leaving smaller nations like Iceland to take the fall. It's a risky business for the EU: In the short term, banks in poorer countries may flounder and fail. And by relinquishing key decisions to its members just as they're turning to EU headquarters for guidance at a time of crisis, the bloc could see decades of attempts to forge unity simply disintegrate. Already, the 27 EU nations are divided over deploying troops to Afghanistan and deadlocked on a constitution designed to transform their union into a political super-state. Only 15 countries now use the common euro currency and the pride of the bloc _ passport-free travel _ doesn't apply to the entire EU.

Failure to pull together now on the financial crisis could push member nations even further apart, perhaps emboldening a resurgent Russia's influence on the fringes of the enlarged EU. "Europe is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis," 256 of the continent's leading economists said Tuesday in an open letter to EU leaders. "Unless European leaders immediately unite to address this crisis before it spirals out of control, they may find themselves fighting over how best to salvage the aftermath," the economists said. They evoked "the dark years of the 1930s," adding: "It is not an exaggeration to say that it could happen again if governments fail to act." And failure to act in unison has been an EU hallmark over the past few years.