It was a jarring image for one of the world’s fastest growing economies: Scores of Vietnamese flooded branches of the nation’s fifth-largest bank to pull out their savings amid rumors the lender was tied to a real estate conglomerate under investigation for fraud, Bloomberg News reported. Vietnam’s central bank spent the last week calming markets and depositors while Saigon Commercial Bank raised interest rates and lured back customers. On Saturday, the regulator said it would place the privately-held lender under “special scrutiny” and directed four banks to help manage it.

The three countries that helped Moscow to maintain crude exports in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine appear to be stepping back into the market for Russian barrels, with Turkey taking a lead role in the latest buying, Bloomberg News reported. A marked increase in the volume of crude on tankers that have yet to signal a final destination makes the task of monitoring Russia’s exports more complicated, but most of those vessels end up in India, with a smaller number heading further east to China.

An Australian regulator hit one of the country’s main casino operators with a record fine, as authorities increase scrutiny of an industry that has faced questions over how it attracts international high-rollers, particularly from China, the Wall Street Journal reported. Star Entertainment Group Ltd., which runs a large casino in Sydney, was fined 100 million Australian dollars, equivalent to $62 million, by the New South Wales Independent Casino Commission on Monday.

The number of corporate bankruptcies in Japan rose 6.9% in the April-September period from a year earlier to 3,141 for the first increase in three years, according to a survey by a credit research company, the Japan Times reported. The rise was attributable to difficulties that companies experienced in repaying financial aid they had received from the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tokyo Shoko Research said.

China's central bank rolled over maturing medium-term policy loans while keeping the interest rate unchanged for a second month on Monday, largely in line with market expectations, Reuters reported. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) said that it was keeping the rate on 500 billion yuan ($69.55 billion) worth of one-year medium-term lending facility (MLF) loans to some financial institutions unchanged at 2.75% from the previous operation.

When China Evergrande Group began struggling under a mountain of debt last year, it quietly set off a chain reaction across the country, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chinese authorities prevented a disorderly collapse of the real-estate colossus, but Evergrande’s distress has spread across China’s housing market and many related industries. The situation has worsened this year into what is now a full-blown property downturn that has become a major drag on China’s economy.

Defaults among emerging market companies continued to pile up in the third quarter due to troubles in Russia as well as China's property sector, with the volume of bonds trading at distressed levels close to record highs, JPMorgan said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The year-to-date default rate for emerging market high-yield firms reached 10.3%, the bank found in its latest default monitor. This was driven by Russian defaults lifting the rate in emerging Europe to 21.7%, while China's property sector woes saw the default rate across Asia run to 12.8%.

In a major reform in the insolvency process, the RBI has allowed asset reconstruction companies (ARCs) with Rs 1,000-crore net worth to bid for taking over a business undergoing insolvency, the Times of India reported. The RBI has also mandated new rules aimed at improving the governance and financial health of ARCs, which are companies that extract value from bad loans. Going by public disclosures, there are currently three ARCs with paid-up capital of over Rs 1,000 crore - Edelweiss, JM and ARCIL.

Indonesian furniture retailer Fabelio has declared bankruptcy, announcing the move through local media. This comes after a Jakarta commercial court reached a verdict on October 5, TechinAsia.com reported. “I declare the debtor [Fabelio] in a state of bankruptcy with all the legal consequences,” Gde Braga Abi Tamara, the startup’s legal curator, told Bisnis Indonesia. On behalf of Fabelio, the curator will handle all of the company’s confiscated assets and then sell them to pay off debts.

New bank lending in China nearly doubled in September from the previous month and far exceeded expectations after the central bank acted to spur an economy weakened by a property crisis and a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, Reuters reported. Chinese banks extended 2.47 trillion yuan ($344.58 billion) in new yuan loans in September, jumping from 1.25 trillion yuan in August, data released by the People's Bank of China showed on Tuesday. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted new yuan loans would rise to 1.80 trillion yuan in September.