The coronavirus pandemic has pushed 51 Japanese companies into bankruptcy with a spike in new cases seen in April, Tokyo Shoko Research said on Friday, underscoring the toll the health crisis is taking on the world’s third-largest economy, Reuters reported. The bankruptcies were mostly in the hotel and restaurant industries such as hot spring hotel operator Fujimi-so in Aichi, central Japan, though they were spreading to small retailers and food producers reliant on inbound tourism, the credit research firm said in a report.

Realtors’ body Naredco on Thursday demanded a stimulus package of at least USD 200 billion to revive the Indian economy from the adverse impact of COVID-19 as well as suspension of insolvency law provisions for six months to prevent companies from becoming bankrput and acquired by foreign entities, The Financial Express reported.

The Indonesia Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS) denied on Thursday media reports that its stress test had shown eight banks at risk of collapse under the government’s worst-case scenario for the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak, Reuters reported. LPS Chairman Halim Alamsyah told an online briefing there were no indications any Indonesian bank would fail. “All banking indicators are normal and their fundamentals sound,” said Alamsyah, a former member of the Indonesian central bank’s board of governors.

The G20 group is planning to offer lower income countries a moratorium on bilateral government loan repayments as part of an “action plan” to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and stave off an emerging markets debt crisis, a senior G20 official said, the Financial Times reported. The initiative, due to be finalised at a finance ministers’ meeting this week, would see a freeze on sovereign debt repayments for six or nine months, or possibly through to 2021, in line with an appeal last month from the IMF and World Bank.

A looming economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is a chance for India to enact sweeping reforms to fix ailing sectors and attract more foreign investment to the country, Bloomberg News reported. That’s a call being made by a former central banker and an ex-government official, as well as financial market participants, who say India needs to liberalize and deepen its financial markets, and take policy steps to fix the banking and farm sectors.

The coronavirus crisis is creating a new threat for Indonesia’s debt-laden state-owned businesses, Bloomberg News reported. Many had binged on debt for years, faced accusations of mismanagement and even corruption, and were running into repayment problems before the virus struck. Now a slump in revenues and a credit crunch triggered by the dollar’s surge mean those risks will get a whole lot worse. “Covid-19 is exacerbating some of the challenges of the state-owned sector,” said Xavier Jean, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings in Singapore.

Bankruptcies among Japanese companies rose for a seventh straight month in March as the coronavirus outbreak slammed the brakes on business activity across the country, Reuters reported. Tokyo Shoko Research, which tracks Japanese bankruptcies, said there were 740 in March, up 11.8 % from a year earlier. Among them, 12 firms went bankrupt due to the coronavirus pandemic as declines in inbound tourism hit sectors such as accommodation and restaurants, the research firm said.

The world’s largest lockdown is, as expected, taking a toll on the Indian economy. Fitch Ratings Inc. expects that India will grow only 2% in the current financial year, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary. That would be the lowest rate in decades, a level not seen since this country was closed-off socialist backwater. But everyone knows that fighting a pandemic is costly. What’s even more worrying is how the costs of a slowdown—the sudden pressure on incomes and demand, in particular—will widen pre-existing cracks in the Indian growth story.

Amid all China’s efforts to contain the economic damage of the coronavirus outbreak, a crucial development slipped by almost unnoticed -- the creation of the first national bad-debt asset manager in 20 years, Bloomberg News reported. Galaxy Asset Management Co. won approval in mid-March to convert into ​a financial asset management firm, gaining a much-coveted license to buy bad loans directly from banks nationwide, and the ability to borrow at relatively low rates.

India’s banks and shadow lenders face a surge in bad debts from the nationwide economic lockdown aimed at combating the coronavirus outbreak, risking a wave of corporate defaults, the Financial Times reported. Rating agencies and analysts are concerned the strict, 21-day lockdown imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — which has shut down all but the most essential economic activity — has threatened the health of the banking sector, particularly the 10,000 or so less-regulated shadow lenders.