With the scale of the disaster in Japan still being measured, concerns are growing that last week's earthquake and tsunami could lead to a long-term disruption in the world's supply of automobiles, consumer electronics and machine tools, the Los Angeles Times reported. Japan is the world's third-largest economy and a huge exporter of cars, electronic components and industrial equipment as well as steel, textiles and processed foods. In turn, it's a voracious consumer of petroleum, imported agricultural products and luxury consumer goods.

On Sunday night, Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan was urging the public not to be pessimistic because Japan will enjoy "a New Deal-like" economic recovery on the back of the massive reconstruction task ahead. Any dividend from reconstruction and reform looked distant on Monday, however. Japanese stocks fell 7.6 percent, on track for the biggest daily loss since October 2008, and bond yields rose as investors expected the disaster to take a huge economic toll and require heavy government borrowing, according to a Reuters Special Report.

Private equity group TPG and its partners won't be the biggest losers if Alinta Energy's dissident shareholders vote down their $2 billion bailout plan for the company next week, The Australian reported. Alinta chief Ross Rolfe has made it clear the company, with 5 per cent of Australia's electricity generation capacity spread across 10 power stations and more than 500,000 retail gas and electricity customers in Victoria and WA, will be placed in administration if the deal does not succeed.

On Thursday, Reserve Bank governor Alan Bollard cut the official cash rate to 2.5% from 3%. But the cut, which was widely anticipated following the Christchurch earthquake last month, may be a relatively short-lived one, The National Business Review reported. The Reserve Bank’s forecasts accompanying the decision suggest the economic recovery has been pushed back to the latter part of 2011 but also highlight increased inflationary pressures compared to the previous outlook.

It turned a few heads Tuesday when an analyst at Fitch was quoted saying that China has a 60% probability of experiencing a banking crisis by 2013, the China Real Time Report blog reported. The analyst, Richard Fox, a London-based senior director at Fitch, told Bloomberg News that Fitch sees risks of “holes in bank balance sheets” should a property bubble burst. The jarring assessment was based on the Macro-Prudential Risk Monitor, a sort of analytical tripwire system that Fitch developed in 2005 to flag potential bank crises.

New Chinese government figures show its national debt load remains low compared with other major economies. But including the debts of local governments and many parts of the state-owned banking sector, as many economists say is proper, shows the constraints facing Beijing in the fight against inflation, its top economic priority, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a report issued during the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, the Ministry of Finance said central government debt at the end of 2010 was $1.03 trillion.

Bond sales by companies outside the financial industry are so scarce in Australia that the nation’s largest retailer, Woolworths Ltd., is paying less to borrow than banks and General Electric Co., Bloomberg reported. Relative yields on Australian company bonds are the lowest in three years, reflecting the paucity of non-financial corporate debt in the nation’s credit market, at less than three percent of the A$32 billion of notes sold in 2011, Bloomberg data and Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Australian Industrial Index show.

Malaysian conglomerate The Lion Group has blamed problems at Vietnam's scandal-hit shipbuilder Vinashin for the failure of a multi-billion-dollar joint venture, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported on an Agence France-Presse story. The $9.8 billion project by state-owned Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Group, or Vinashin, and Lion would have included a steel mill, power plants and a sea port in the southern Vietnamese province of Ninh Thuan. Vietnamese officials said last month that the project's investment license had been revoked because investors didn't fulfill their commitments.

Confidence in the economy has fallen to a two-year low after the Christchurch earthquake, according to the monthly BNZ Confidence Survey, The National Business Review reported. A net 20% of the 456 respondents to the survey expect the economy to get worse over the coming year. This was down from a net 22% expecting improvement in the early February survey and 35% expressing net positive sentiment 12 months ago. It was the worst result since March 2009, when a net 23.2% of respondents expected the economy to get worse.

U.S. private-equity fund TPG Capital and Japanese consumer lender J-Trust are the likely contenders to take over failed consumer lender Takefuji, in a decision to be announced as early as the end of this month, according to sources familiar with the situation, The Wall Street Journal reported. TPG Capital, Cerberus Capital Management, J Trust, Tokyo Star Bank and Korea's A&P Financial are the five finalists for the final round of bidding, the people said.