After posting their worst week in history, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index both posted big gains today. The Dow closed up 11 percent, or 936 points. It was the Dow's largest single-day point gain, far surpassing the jump of 499 points on March 16, 2000.

Only four other days -- all during the late 1920s and early 1930s -- have seen larger percentage gains for the Dow.

The S&P was up 11.6 percent, or 104 points, in its best one-day gain since 1939. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was up 11.8 percent, or 195 points.

Stocks snapped an eight-day losing streak fueled by deepening concerns of a global recession. The Dow and S&P both lost 18 percent of their value last week, the worst week in Wall Street history.

Frustrated investors and traders appear cheered today by pledges of a coordinated global approach following a meeting of the finance ministers from the world's wealthiest countries, known as the Group of Seven, this weekend in Washington.

European leaders have said they would inject new capital into troubled banks and guarantee interbank lending. Britain announced today it would spend $64 billion to bail out three major banks: Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds.

The Treasury Department is also working on a plan to buy stakes in troubled banks. The head of the government's $700 billion financial rescue plan began to outline details of the program today and said appointments would be announced soon. "A program as large and complex as this would normally take months -- or even years -- to establish," Neel Kashkari, interim assistant Treasury secretary for financial stability, said this morning. "We don't have months or years."

U.S. regulators are expected to announce an expanded response to the crisis as soon as tomorrow morning. "It feels like we're beginning to get the feeling that regulators and governments are doing what they have to, to get the liquidity flowing again," said John Wilson, co-head of the equity group at Morgan Keegan, in Memphis.

After days of sell-offs, today's rally has also unleashed bargain hunters. "I think there are some people out there that think things are so bad it can't get much worse," said Wilson. Institutional and individual investors have pulled a tremendous amount of money out of the market in recent weeks that they may be willing to spend again, he said.

"I think right now, anything that helps confidence will help the market," said Wilson.

Overseas markets surged on the efforts. London's FTSE finished up 7 percent, while Germany's DAX and the CAC40 in Paris were up 10.6 percent and 9.2 percent respectively. The Japanese stock market was closed today, but other Asian indexes had gains of anywhere from 3 percent to more than 10 percent in Hong Kong.