NEW YORK — Last Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 189 points, roaring past 13,000 for the first time since Jan. 3. Wide daily stock-price swings are becoming rare, blue chips have regained most of the ground lost earlier this year and there's less talk of a global financial crash.

So we're out of the woods, right? The answer is, nobody's quite sure.

"We are closer to the end of this problem than we are to the beginning," said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, repeating April 30 on Bloomberg Television a phrase that's become almost a mantra on Wall Street.

The same statement was made in April by the head of Citigroup, the nation's largest bank, as well as by the CEOs of several top investment banks. Their consensus: The worst is over.

However, many important voices disagree.

"I can't honestly say I think that's the case yet. I think we have a ways to go yet. I don't think we've cleansed the system," said David Rubenstein, founder and president of the Carlyle Group. It's one of the world's largest private-equity firms, which borrow large sums of money to take over companies, improve them and resell them for a profit.

Speaking to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers last week, Rubenstein said that markets have just scratched the surface of discovering balance-sheet holes. He added that "no one really knows when the upswing is going to happen. ... I don't think we are quite at the bottom yet, and I do think we have some months to go."

The deep housing slowdown triggered problems last August in housing finance and they've since spread. Home prices and sales continue falling month after month, leaving the health of an important part of the financial sector unclear.

"I think the reality of it is, nobody knows where we are right now," said Daniel Mudd, president and CEO of quasi-government mortgage lender Fannie Mae.

"This is terra incognita," he added. "There is no silver bullet to solve this problem. Time has got to pass."

Still, one reason for Wall Street's decidedly more upbeat mood is the Federal Reserve's unprecedented action on March 16 to broker the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns.

The Fed not only orchestrated the sale at a fire-sale price to JP Morgan Chase, but it also did something no Fed had ever done before: It became the lender of last resort to virtually all players on Wall Street, not just commercial banks. And it accepted virtually any sort of financial instrument as collateral, including the toxic mortgage bonds that triggered today's crisis.

The message was clear: The Fed won't stand by and watch a domino-like collapse of financial markets.

"I think that whole incident calmed people down. It showed that the Fed was going to take whatever steps were necessary," said Larry Kantor, managing director of Barclays Capital in New York. "As more and more information is coming out on how financial institutions are faring, obviously they've lost a lot of money, they continue to lose a lot of money, but the numbers we've seen ... are not life threatening. We're all going to survive this, and that is a real comfort."

That wasn't a sure thing two months ago.

Some reasons for Wall Street's renewed optimism include: