**CIT, the troubled American bank, has approved a $3bn (£1.8bn) rescue loan from major shareholders to keep the company out of bankruptcy, reports say.**The emergency financing is aimed at giving the firm time to restructure some of its debt payments, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal said.
CIT had been in talks with major banks, including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
The US government has said it will not offer a bail-out to CIT - which lends to small and medium-sized businesses.
Last week, shares in CIT plunged as analysts warned investors should brace themselves for the bank’s collapse - though they later rallied on news of the rescue talks.
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Fitch and Moody’s - the credit ratings agencies - downgraded CIT on Thursday, after it said it was unlikely to receive any more government help.
The US Treasury said that the government needed to “keep the threshold high” for exceptional aid to individual companies.
The failure of CIT would remove a key source of credit for thousands of small and middle-sized US firms, which are already struggling in the recession.
If CIT, founded more than a century ago, went bankrupt it would join Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual on the list of large financial services companies to collapse since the acceleration of the credit crisis in September last year.
But analysts say that if it did fail, it would be unlikely to have the same impact.