International Business Machines Corp. raised $4 billion yesterday in the biggest U.S. bond sale in five weeks after the company said its profit this year will hold up against the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

IBM, the world’s largest computer-services company, took advantage of its announcement Wednesday that third-quarter earnings likely beat analyst estimates and full-year profit will meet management’s forecast.

“You gotta strike while the fire’s hot,” said Scott MacDonald, director of research at Aladdin Capital Management in Stamford, Conn., whose firm manages about $16.5 billion of assets. “Who knows when the credit market’s going to be open again? Timing is everything.”

The offering, IBM’s biggest, may open the market for other borrowers, said Vincent Murray, managing director and head of U.S. fixed-income syndicate at Mizuho Securities USA in New York.

“I don’t expect a floodgate, but there will be more deals,” said Murray, whose firm was a co-manager on the deal. IBM’s “a premier name and certainly with none of the exposure that the market is worried about.”

Elsewhere in the credit markets:

•The Dutch government said yesterday it has set up a 20 billion euro ($27.4 billion) fund to support financial institutions in the Netherlands during the ongoing credit crisis.

Finance Minister Wouter Bos said the move was not targeting any specific bank or insurer and the money would be available to any “essentially healthy” company that requests it.

After the nationalization of the Dutch operations of Fortis NV and ABN Amro this month, the only remaining large Dutch financial companies with stock market listings are bank and insurer ING Groep NV and insurer Aegon NV.

•A group of 48 banks in Connecticut yesterday agreed at the request of Gov. Jodi Rell to each commit $1 million to a new loan pool to assure businesses in the state that credit is still available.

The banks, from the Connecticut commercial banking arm of Citigroup to local institutions such as Webster Bank, joined with the governor to unveil the loan pool, which permits them to extend credit to some businesses and share the liability they will get repaid. The governor also announced plans to increase credit available through a series of government initiatives.

“I am not asking them to make bad loans,” Rell said in a statement. “I am asking them to work with our small businesses — to send the message that Connecticut’s banks are open and ready for business and that credit is available.”

•The London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, for three-month bank-to-bank dollar loans rose to 4.75 percent from 4.52 percent on Wednesday. Just a month ago, three-month LIBOR was at 2.81 percent.

That stubbornly high LIBOR is just one of the reasons that the stock market has been tumbling. When banks are loath to lend, a weak economy has a hard time bouncing back. LIBOR’s sharp jump over the past month is worrisome because consumer loans such as adjustable-rate mortgages are tied to LIBOR — meaning that those mortgages could become harder to pay. Citigroup analysts recently predicted that continued stress in LIBOR will result in a 10-percent jump in defaults for outstanding non-delinquent adjustable-rate mortgages when they reset.

•Commercial paper outstanding dropped for the fourth straight week. Commercial paper is a type of debt companies sell to get short-term cash, often so that they can maintain their inventories and payrolls. The Fed said commercial paper outstanding fell by $56.4 billion to a seasonally-adjusted $1.55 trillion in the week ended Oct. 8 — that’s down from $1.82 billion on Sept. 10, and down 30 percent from the peak of $2.2 trillion in the summer of 2007.

• Banks borrowed in record amounts from the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facility over the past week, while investment firms drew slightly less.

The Fed’s report released yesterday said commercial banks averaged a record $75 billion in daily borrowing over the past week. That compared with a daily average of $44.5 billion in the previous week, the old record.

For the week ending Wednesday, investment firms drew $134 billion. That was down from a record $147.7 billion in the previous week.

IBM’s preliminary earnings report sent its shares up as much as 5.3 percent yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading before they fell with the rest of the market, closing down $1.55 at $89. The company is counting on emerging markets and long-term contracts to make up for a slump in the financial-services market triggered by bank failures and tightening credit.

With Associated Press reports