Guarded optimism mounted on Tuesday for a unified international response to the credit crisis ricocheting around the world after Australia cut interest rates far more steeply than expected.
The focus shifted to other central banks, from Japan to Europe, for their answers to a call from US officials for a "forceful and coordinated" global reaction to kickstart anemic bank lending.
Despair that such a solution had not yet been found weighed on some markets. Investors soured in particular on South Korea's ability to weather the storm.
But equities across Asia rallied after the Australian central bank cut its benchmark cash rate by 100 basis points, the first move of that magnitude since December 1994. The MSCI Asia ex-Japan stock index gained 0.6 percent.
"If the need is there to get rates down toward something that's more neutral, then why dilly dally? Get it done in one go," said Brian Redican, an economist at Macquarie. "It's a flexibility other central banks should take careful note of."
The furious sell-off in global equities in recent weeks and the deepening freeze in credit markets has made this week's Group of Seven rich nations' meeting in Washington even more important.
"The key issue is coordination of policies, since individual country policies aimed at shoring up confidence of domestic institutions can actually exacerbate systemic risk by altering relative risk between countries," said Ashley Davies, a currency strategist with UBS in Singapore.
Speculation is swirling that China, with US bonds making up the lion's share of its $1.81 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the world's biggest stockpile, could have a key role to play in any global response.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher, considered an inflation hawk, said capital markets were in "semi-panic" and said he was more worried about markets breaking down than upward pressure on prices.
"What I'm more worried about is how dysfunctional the system has become and what we, as the lender of last resort, need to do to encourage the liquidity to flow," he said.
The US Treasury, charged with putting the $700 billion fund to work to buy up bad debt, named Neel Kashkari, a veteran banker from Goldman Sachs, to head the landmark program.
The New York Federal Reserve moved toward establishing a central clearing mechanism for credit default swaps, a form of over-the-counter insurance against bankruptcy blamed by critics for destabilizing the entire financial system.
Other steps aimed at shoring up banks and easing pressure on credit markets could be coming -- a Treasury official said the $700 billion US bailout fund could be used to buy company shares.
A person familiar with the matter also said the US Treasury and Fed could take steps to support the commercial paper market -- a crucial way for corporate borrowers outside the financial sector to raise short-term funds.
Emerging markets, which had gained most from the surging global expansion in the last three years, were sucked into the vortex. Trading was halted in markets as far afield as Brazil and Russia when stocks plunged.
Mexico's peso sank to its weakest level since the currency was allowed to float in the mid-1990s, and stocks plunged.
"We are in a state of panic. Markets are out of control," said Bertrand Delgado, an economist at IDEAglobal who covers Latin America.
Brazil's government unveiled a flurry of new economic, the latest in a series of steps aimed at insulating the country's financial system from the global credit crisis. The government will issue a decree allowing the central bank to acquire loan portfolios of small and mid-sized local banks if needed.
The banking upheaval that began on Wall Street has effectively shut down interbank and other loan markets, pushing industrialized countries closer to recession. Conditions remained poor for interbank lending.
Fed fund futures have priced in a probability of a 75 basis-point cut by the US central bank this month. - Reuters