LONDON, Oct 13: Global stock markets staged spectacular gains on Monday as governments pumped billions of dollars into banks crippled by the credit crunch, coaxing newly confident investors into buying shares.

Wall Street skyrocketed at the opening, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 6.19 per cent in positive territory at 8,974.56 by mid-day. The tech-heavy Nasdaq had surged 6.09 per cent to 1,749.93.

Most European markets closed with double-digit increases. Hong Kong surged 10 per cent in earlier Asian trade.The London FTSE 100 index of leading shares jumped 8.26 per cent to close at 4,256.90 while in Paris the CAC 40 rose 11.18 per cent -- its largest ever one-day gain -- to 3,531.50. The Frankfurt Dax soared 11.40 per cent to 5,062.45.

There were gains of 11.39 per cent on the Swiss Market Index, 11.49 per cent in Milan and 10.65 per cent in Madrid.

Bucking the trend was Moscow, where Russia’s two stock exchanges closed down more than four per cent.

The sharp falls came despite a Kremlin announcement that President Dmitry Medvedev had signed off on a rescue plan that is to provide an estimated $150 billion to prop up Russia’s troubled financial markets.

Stock markets in the Middle East meanwhile made a strong comeback led by bourses in the oil-rich Gulf. The Saudi market, the largest in the Arab world, closed up 9.5 per cent well above the 6,000-point mark after plunging to a four-year low of 5,794.87 at the start of the trading week on Saturday.

“We have had our first significant bounce in the markets for sometime now,” City Index market strategist Joshua Raymond said in London.

But he cautioned: “It’s a dangerous time to start believing we have hit a bottom in the markets. With the volatility here to stay and confidence likely to seesaw for sometime, we are only really going to be able to tell if we have hit a bottom a month after we have done so.”

Investor sentiment got a boost after the leaders of the 15-country eurozone, following the lead of Europe’s financial giant Britain, agreed over the weekend on a high-stakes joint bid to pull the world financial system back from the brink of collapse.

“The main message from the weekend meetings is that governments the world over seem to get the severity of the financial crisis now and are intent on taking extreme measures to improve matters,” said Patrick O’Hare, analyst at Briefing.com.

“For now, things are moving in the right direction, both on the credit market and stock market fronts,” he said.—AFP