Asian finance ministers and central bankers may gather this weekend to hold an Asian version of the meeting that took place in Washington last Saturday and Sunday to discuss strategies for averting further financial crisis, Japanese government sources have told The Times.

Chilled by vivid memories of their own financial meltdown ten years ago, governments across Asia yesterday rushed to help to stem the bloodletting on stock markets and restore the architecture of the global credit system.

In the rush to support American and European rescue efforts and with bank runs in Hong Kong already a reality, some issued sweeping guarantees for savers.

Several central banks pledged to provide cash for credit markets as part of the drive to nurse the global money system back to health.

Declarations by South Korea, Hong Kong and other Asian states came in response to market fears that they had underestimated their vulnerability to US and European bank failures.

Indonesia, which shut its stock market last week under a deluge of selling, raised its guarantee on bank deposits and eased the mechanism for providing money markets with funding. India cut the cash reserve requirements to better lubricate the funding process.

Several Asian governments, including Singapore and Bahrain, engaged in “verbal intervention”, allowing senior politicians a platform to boost the strength of their economies and the hardiness of their banking systems. Despite a bulging current account deficit, South Korea was by far the most vociferous in the assertion that its banks were in rude health.

Those efforts were welcomed by grateful investors, who had been desperately hoping for an opportunity to dip back into the worst-savaged stocks.

With Tokyo closed for a holiday, Hong Kong stocks were the main beneficiary, jumping 10.2 per cent in a volatile session's trading. The Korean won, which dropped heavily against the US dollar last week, soared by nearly 6 per cent - its biggest one-day rise in a decade.

Most spectacular were the measures suggested by Japan, the giant export-led economy that many analysts believe has already tumbled into recession.

Taro Aso, the Prime Minister, instructed his Cabinet yesterday to examine reviving a law allowing public fund injections into regional banks - a law that Japan used repeatedly during the £300billion bailout of its own financial system in the 1990s.

Fresh from the weekend's G7 meeting in Washington, Shoichi Nakagawa, the Finance Minister, said that he was considering a blanket guarantee on all bank deposits - a potentially critical move in an economy with the world's largest savings pool.

At the moment Japanese savings accounts and bank deposits are guaranteed up to 10 million yen (£58,000), but Japanese households already know from bitter experience how vulnerable their savings are - when their own banking crisis hit about six years ago, many simply spread their money across several accounts, each loaded with exactly Y10million.

The Bank of Japan said that it stood ready to join the efforts of other central banks to boost dollar funding to the money markets. “Central banks will continue to work together and are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary to provide sufficient liquidity in short-term funding markets,” it said in a statement.

The spectre of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the speed and ferocity with which it devastated emerging markets in the region has already begun to haunt central banks. The Governor of the Bank of Indonesia said yesterday that he would be prepared to use every means available, including direct market intervention, to prop up the sliding rupiah.

President Arroyo of the Philippines said that she was “urging the developed countries to consider the interest of developing countries in their plan to prevent a worldwide economic meltdown”.

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