Wall Street stocks rose sharply, pushing nearer complete recovery from last month's market meltdown.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 101.87 points, or 1.3 per cent, to 7,826.61, putting it above 7,800 for the first time since October 24th.

Broad-market indexes also posted sizeable gains, keeping pace with the blue-chip sector after lagging Wednesday's advance. Investors were cheered by news that Japanese prime minister Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto said his government may tap public funds to help Japanese banks saddled with billions of dollars in bad loans.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by more than two-to-one on the New York Stock Exchange, with 2,056 up, 922 down and 486 unchanged.

NYSE volume totalled 601.79 million shares, against 537.05 million in the previous session.

The Standard and Poor's 500-stock index rose 14.40 to 958.99, the NYSE composite index rose 6.64 to 500.54, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 25.34 to 1,626.56.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 5.01 to 435.70, and the smll-company dominated American Stock Exchange composite index rose 5.00 to 672.85.

Earlier yesterday Nasdaq and MCI Communications Corp. announced plans for a new electronic trading system that will more than quadruple the computer-run stock market's speed and trading capacity.

The new network, a $600 million contract for MCI, is expected to be completed over the next 18 months and will initially be able to handle four billion shares a day. It could eventually be increased to eight billion shares, officials said.

Trading volume on Nasdaq has averaged about 650 million shares a day this year through October, officials said, though volume leaped to more than 1.3 billion shares when stock prices tumbled on October 27th.