Cause for caution

"We are going up," says one of the CNBC anchors at the opening bell. "For now," adds another.

There's already a lot of doubt about whether today's action is the beginning of things to come. The LAT's Tom Petruno puts it this way:

When the stock market goes on sale, smart investors are supposed to seize the opportunity. But Wall Street's decline of the last three weeks has been so drastic, it has left even veteran money managers too afraid to step up. Aren't stocks cheap yet? Nearly everyone agrees that, on paper, they are, with major indexes such as the Dow Jones industrials now at five-year lows and down more than 40% from a year ago. Yet instead of attracting bargain-hunters, lower prices have had the opposite effect: Stocks have crumbled so quickly recently that many potential buyers have been driven back to the sidelines.

The real question is not the stock market but the credit market. And NYT columnist Floyd Norris says there's no assurance that the weekend's frantic maneuvering by the world’s major bankers and finance ministers will work.

In an effort to get credit moving, European leaders on Sunday promised to guarantee new loans to banks, which have stopped lending to one another as the crisis has deepened. But they left it up to each nation’s government to provide details of how its own banking system would be protected. Australia also announced such guarantees, but there was no similar announcement from the United States, where officials declined to say what action, if any, they would take.

The Dow is up 365 points in the first few minutes of trading. Volume is expected to be low because of the Columbus Day holiday.