It only took trillions of dollars of government cash and guarantees, but the fear gripping global markets finally has begun to ease.
Now it's up to the world's bankers to step up and do their part to keep the credit crisis from unleashing financial Armageddon.
The mood shift so far has been modest, but encouraging. After weeks of mounting panic in markets around the globe, benchmark interest rates on loans between big banks fell this week for the first time since late July, signifying a greater willingness by banks to extend credit to each other.
For example, the so-called Libor rate for one-month loans in dollars slid to 4.18% on Friday from 4.59% a week earlier.
Yields on three-month U.S. Treasury bills, meanwhile, rose to 0.82% from 0.19% a week ago. That suggested that some investors have stopped hoarding super-safe Treasury securities and are moving that money into higher-paying, higher-risk investments.
Most world stock markets recorded their first weekly gains in a month. Although the Dow Jones industrial average fell 127.04 points, or 1.4%, to 8,852.22 on Friday, it rallied 4.8% for the week.
And after months of rumors dominated by speculation about what large financial institution would be next to fail, the whispers on Wall Street on Friday were that a major U.S. bank was lending again to other banks.
Imagine -- a bank making a loan!
Still, credit -- the lifeblood of the economy -- isn't flowing freely by any means. There was no money to save retailer Mervyn's, for example; the chain, which filed for bankruptcy protection in July but planned to keep operating, on Friday said it would liquidate.
Tiny Iceland finds itself in financial ruin after being forced to nationalize its banks, which have been unable to refinance debts estimated to total more than 10 times the size of the country's economy.
And borrowing costs for U.S. companies, if they can borrow at all, have continued to soar. The annualized yield on an index of 100 junk-bond issues tracked by KDP Investment Advisors -- a measure of the interest a high-risk company would have to pay on new bonds -- jumped to 16.31% on Friday, up from 10.6% just five weeks ago.
Still, to see even the tentative improvements in credit markets this week was psychologically important for banks, investors, companies and government regulators.
"I think we're on the verge of some sort of resolution" of the credit crisis, said George Goncalves, a bond strategist at brokerage Morgan Stanley.
