EDITOR’S NOTE: Liz Peek is a financial columnist.

Baseball season is underway, and this week scoreboards lit up on Wall Street, too.

Investors are watching first-quarter earnings reports to see just how companies are faring with the economic slowdown. Aluminum giant Alcoa started the season by announcing disappointing results and a gloomy projection, and UPS chimed in with bad news mid-week. Just this morning, General Electric reported worse-than-expected numbers, and dropped its forecast for the year as well. The news from GE, a broad-based “bellwether” company, will probably cause stocks to trade down today.

Retail stores reported weak March sales, but the reports were hard to decipher given that Easter (though not spring, I might add) came early this year. The happiest report this week came from Wal-Mart, which came in with rising sales and a more positive outlook for the year. Consumers, it seems, are trading down.

Otherwise, traders were cheered by the announcement on Monday that Novartis was buying eye-care company Alcon from Nestle. There have been precious few deals announced in recent months. The banks are all trying to trim the debt on their balance sheets, and have been reluctant to provide financing for takeovers. Not only do acquisitions tend to put a floor under stock prices, but these days they are a sign that the credit crisis may be easing.

The truth is, there’s plenty of money around. Money market funds are flush, as investors have cashed in riskier investments and sought safe havens, and hedge funds are sitting on piles of cash as well. What are they waiting for? Just as home buyers tend to think they’re better off waiting in this market, so traders are reluctant to commit, for fear of losing out on bargains later on. Not only do we have a credit crisis – we also have a crisis of confidence.

There’s talk that the lows (of mid-January) need to be “retested,” or that we have to see a real blowout down day in the market before investors will come back in. No one knows what might set off such a “capitulation” moment, and so far none of the bad news on housing or retail sales has spurred such a sell-off.

In fact, the market proved resilient this week, trading only modestly lower in spite of oil prices hitting an all-time high above $112 per barrel. The run-up stemmed from a surprisingly sharp draw-down in oil inventories and, I think, rampant speculation. Hedge funds are desperately looking for places to put money to work (they have to earn those huge fees, after all) and oil is as sure a bet as you can find today. The great thing about trading oil is that you’re unlikely to wake up to news that would cause a sharp sell-off. No one is likely to discover a huge new field overnight or an energy source that could really crimp demand. On the contrary, most of the surprises tend to boost prices higher – war, terrorist attacks, Hugo Chavez.

Against these soggy economic happenings, financial leaders from around the world will meet in Washington today. They will talk a lot about regulation and how to ease the credit crisis, but I don’t imagine much new will come out of this gathering.

This past week the Bank of England cut rates, again, responding to that country’s declining housing market, while the European Central Bank once again declined to do so. Consequently, the dollar, as you would expect, has strengthened a bit compared to the pound but continues to look sick next to the Euro. I think the ECB will have to cut rates eventually. There’s plenty of evidence of slowing in Germany, Spain and elsewhere, which will bring pressure on the central bank to ease.

Overall, I see some signs that the credit crisis is moving slowly off the front page, thank heavens. The investment into Washington Mutual by a private equity firm that was announced this week was heartening. In the next month, the government will begin to send rebate checks out, which will, not withstanding the media pooh-poohing, be quite significant (as in $2,100 for a family of five.) Let’s hope that begins to lift spirits, and sales. Now that would be a sign of spring!