Creditors, shaken by the economic turmoil, are not providing the kind of short-term financing that governments, normally safe bets, depend on to stay afloat until tax revenue is collected.

“There may have been a little gamesmanship, a little pressure put on Congress to make sure the bailout passed,” said Sujit M. CanagaRetna, a fiscal analyst at the Council of State Governments, a research group. “But there is no doubt there is a severe credit crunch.”

Massachusetts, he said, recently fell $170 million short of the $400 million it had sought in the credit market to make a routine quarterly aid payment to cities and towns. Louisiana and New Mexico both postponed multimillion-dollar bond sales in the face of the quivering market.

The problem, he said, may grow worse as 15 states besides California, including New York and Connecticut, work to fill several billion dollars in funding gaps that have emerged this fall.

In his letter, first reported by The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Schwarzenegger said, “California and other states may be unable to obtain the necessary level of financing to maintain government operations and may be forced to turn to the federal treasury for short-term financing.”

Treasury officials said they were reviewing the letter.

If California follows through on a $7 billion request, the loan, the equivalent of $192 for each resident, could surpass the federal government’s bailout of New York City in 1975 as it teetered on bankruptcy. After initially refusing, the federal government eventually provided $2.5 billion in federal loan guarantees that helped the city recover.

Still, Mr. Schwarzenegger and state officials said they viewed such a loan as a last resort in the event the government recovery plan did not sufficiently unlock the credit market.

Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

“It is hard to get that loan” in the markets, Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “If we can’t get that loan through the normal course, we will go through the federal government, and we already set that in motion.”

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Asked what would happen if the markets or the government did not come through, Mr. Schwarzenegger replied, “This is no such thing in my vocabulary as, ‘what if not.’ We will.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger plans to meet on Saturday morning with John Chiang, the state comptroller, to discuss the problem, and to gather next week with legislative leaders to strategize.

Bill Lockyer, the state treasurer, had warned Wednesday that as Congress debated the rescue plan, the state had been locked out of credit markets for the past 10 days. “The credit market is frozen because financial institutions are afraid to commit capital amid enormous uncertainty,” he said.

Mr. Lockyer also said the state’s cash reserves would drain completely near the end of the month, jeopardizing payments for teachers’ salaries, nursing homes, law enforcement and an array of other state-financed services. California’s 5,000 cities, counties and school districts, he added, would face the same fate.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Lockyer said the state routinely received short-term loans in the fall to cover payments until state coffers refill in the spring from tax revenue and other sources. But the shuttered credit market has upended the system, he said, adding that even if the credit markets loosened, it could cost more to borrow. He noted that in the weeks leading up to the crisis, borrowing terms had increased.

Still, Mr. Lockyer said he believed the recovery plan would provide some relief and predicted that would be more likely than the government loan.

“No one likes looking over the precipice, but I think we’re O.K.,” Mr. Lockyer said.

Analysts said the credit problems in California in part reflected years of budget problems lingering from the economic downturn after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The state’s failure to bring the state budget back into balance in good times left the state very vulnerable to the downturn it is facing this cycle,” said Robert Kurtter of Moody’s Investors Service.

Late in September, California adopted a $143 billion budget, 85 days overdue, after a protracted fight between Mr. Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over how to close a $15 billion gap.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

The budget included some cuts in services. It also relied on accounting maneuvers and assumptions like voter approval to borrow $5 billion against future lottery revenue and to expand the state’s rainy-day fund to 12.5 percent of general fund expenditures, from 5 percent.