WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve will announce a new, comprehensive financial rescue package this morning that includes guaranteeing loans between banks and taking direct stakes in troubled banks.

These plans include using about $250 billion from the $700 billion financial rescue plan recently passed by Congress to provide a capital infusion -- via buying equity stakes -- to about nine struggling financial firms, according to officials familiar with the plan.

Another element will provide a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantee for inter-bank lending, the loans that banks normally give one another overnight or for short periods of time. This lending has dried up as banks fear they might be lending to an institution that could prove unable to repay. The shutdown of interbank lending has caused a global credit crunch that threatens to turn into a global recession.

President Bush will meet with a working group of the nation's top financial regulators early today, and will then make a statement from the White House Rose Garden before U.S. financial markets open.

All these are efforts to halt the global financial crisis in its tracks, and reflect strong steps announced by European nations over the weekend and yesterday to do the same.

The new Bush administration approach reflects how a galloping global financial crisis has quickly outpaced its earlier plan, which sought to spark lending between banks and to corporations by removing distressed assets from bank balance sheets.

Delays in passing this plan in Congress, and later strife among European nations as they tried to forge a comprehensive approach, sent global financial markets crashing last week. Over the weekend, European leaders rallied behind plans suggested by Great Britain and adopted a program of interbank loan guarantees and governments taking equity stakes in banks.

Today, Washington will endorse the same approach.

"You have to recognize that it wasn't policy coordination; it was policy emulation in global capital markets, where financial firms have their footprints in many markets," said Vince Reinhart, a former chief economist of the Fed's rate-setting Open Market Committee. "If you do it in one market, you are going to have to do it in another. And that is what happened to the Treasury. Markets work a lot faster than action plans."

Heartened by expectations that the U.S. Treasury and the Fed would soon embrace Europe's aggressive moves, Wall Street traders sent U.S. stocks stampeding back to life yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average scored its biggest one-day point gain ever, and all three major U.S. stock indices scored gains of more than 11 percent.

Boosting stocks, too, was the sheer size of the British and European financial rescue efforts. Leaders of Germany, France, Britain and other nations yesterday put price tags on the plans they had loosely unveiled Sunday. Together, the British and European plans involved pledges exceeding $2.5 trillion to restore confidence in fragile financial markets.

London's FTSE exchange responded by rising 8.3 percent, the second-highest percentage close on record, according to British newspapers. Exchanges in France and Germany were up 11.2 percent and 11.4 percent, respectively. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index started the global rally, closing yesterday up 10.2 percent.

While the global stock rally was heartening, the bigger problem dogging the world's financial system rests in credit markets, where banks are hoarding cash. The gauge to show whether things are getting better will come from a variety of lending rates as well as the spread, or gap, between them and yields on short and medium-term Treasury bonds. U.S. bond markets were closed yesterday for Columbus Day, but European credit measures all got a touch better yesterday, pointing to the first cracks in a deep freeze.

Can yesterday's global rally, which in the United States gained back more than half of last week's losses, continue? Some experts believe so, pointing to the greater clarity that will be gained from direct government investment in troubled banks.

"I think this is a little easier to figure out than buying up the bad assets. I think the market likes it because it is clear, and it is more consistent with what the Europeans are doing," said David Wyss, chief economist with the ratings agency Standard & Poor's in New York. "Attacking it on a global basis seems more and more logical."

Under the U.S. plan to buy shares in financial institutions, government will take preferred stakes that don't harm existing investors. The government will not have a controlling, or even a voting, interest in the institutions; once they return to stable profitability, the government is expected to sell the stakes to earn taxpayers a profit.

Even so, it's likely that the federal government will be business partners with major banks for years, something that has never happened before -- although government has held a close regulatory relationship with commercial banks since the Great Depression.

Treasury's newly appointed point man for the rescue effort, Neel Kashkari, underscored in a speech yesterday just how difficult his task is in moving quickly.

"A program as large and complex as this would normally take months -- or even years -- to establish. We don't have months or years," he said.