The shock of the poor US employment figures seems to have worn off, helped by some positive action by the Federal Reserve. No, not an emergency interest rate cut as had been rumoured. At least not yet.
Instead the Fed has announced it would hold a series of repurchase operations totalling $100bn (£50m) to help ease liquidity problems. This is on top of the earlier Fed announcement about an increase of $20bn in its Term Auction Facility auctions this month.
The upshot of all this is that Wall Street, which dropped around 120 points on the jobs news, is now just 12 points lower. The FTSE 100 has also recovered, and is down just 33 points at 5733.4.
Even the beleaguered banks are a bit brighter. Lloyds TSB is around 3.5% higher while HBOS - which has been under the cosh recently - is up a similar amount as investors took heart from its recent roadshows.
But the credit crunch is continuing to bite hard, not least among the hedge funds, as is spelled out today on the Fintag blog.
The volatility and uncertainty all this causes inevitably fuels the gossips. Earlier Barclays, up 0.5p to 427.5p, was rumoured to be interested in Societe Generale. Another tale has since emerged, this time HSBC, down 3p to 764p, for UBS. Watch this space.
