Many stock markets rose today and winners during the recent turmoil, such as the yen and gold, slipped as at least temporary calm returned to markets a day after coordinated global interest rate cuts.
Wall Street looked set for a solid start and European shares were 1.3 per cent higher, but off their highs. Badly hit emerging market shares as measured by MSCI were up 2.6 per cent.
Demand for government bonds, gold and low-yielding currencies - all recent beneficiaries of investors searching for relative safety - fell.
The direction of the moves was the mirror of what happened yesterday and earlier in the week, but nowhere near matched the degree.
In Dublin, the Iseq index of Irish shares was up 3 per cent at 1.10pm, although off earlier highs of 5 per cent.
MSCI's main world stock index, for example, was up 0.7 per cent. But it lost 3.9 per cent yesterday, 3 per cent on Tuesday and 6.1 per cent on Monday.
Today's relative calm followed an unprecedented display of international coordination yesterday when the US Federal Reserve and central banks from Europe, Canada and China executed emergency rate cuts in the face of plunging global equity markets and the worst financial crisis in some 80 years.
"Markets are not turning positive, they are recovering from heavy losses that we saw earlier this week. he sentiment has not really improved," said Rik Zwaneveld, trader at AFS Brokers, in Amsterdam.
"The rate cuts are a good step in the right direction to stop the bleeding, but this won't be enough."
Echoing this, Japan's Nikkei closed down, finishing 0.5 percent lower in a choppy session and down for a sixth straight day for its lowest close since June 2003.
Against this background, governments and financial authorities were continuing to intervene.
The Bank of Japan made its biggest same-day money market injection since the global credit crisis blew up, supplying a total of four trillion yen ($40 billion).
Australia's central bank also lent $10 billion in its US dollar repurchase auction. South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan cut interest rates.
Late on Wednesday, meanwhile, the European Central Bank said it would halve the premium banks pay for emergency borrowing over its main refinancing rate.
Analysts at Barclays reckoned the additional ECB measures in practise added almost a further 75 basis points in cuts on top of the official 50 basis point rate cut made earlier.
The various moves over the past few days helped ease some tension in interbank lending -- a crucial element of the credit crisis.
The cost of interbank borrowing of overnight funds fell. But the wide-ranging measures had little impact on longer-term lending rates, as three-month dollar London interbank offered rates jumped almost 23 basis points to their highest this year.
Agencies