Sri Lanka warned of an unprecedented default and halted payments on foreign debt, an extraordinary step taken to preserve its dwindling dollar stockpile for essential food and fuel imports, Bloomberg News reported. All outstanding payments to bond holders, bilateral creditors and institutional lenders will be suspended until a debt restructure, the finance ministry said in a statement Tuesday. The newly appointed central bank governor, Nandalal Weerasinghe, said in a briefing that authorities are seeking to negotiate with creditors and warning of a possible default.

Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui is offering to repay the more than $100 million he owes creditors in part by offering up the yacht that drove him to bankruptcy, court papers show, Bloomberg News reported. The businessman’s debt stems from a $30 million loan he got from a fund in 2008, which according to the lender Guo failed to repay. Guo arranged for the yacht to leave U.S. waters sometime after October 2020, putting it out of the reach of debt collectors.

The Indian government on Friday said that it has amended the insolvency laws pertaining to voluntary liquidation to speed up the process, the Times of India reported. The laws on voluntary liquidation are part of the ones aimed at improving ease-of-doing business by allowing a smooth exit for firms. A statement from the government said that the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (Voluntary Liquidation Process) (Amendment) Regulations, 2022 were notified on April 5, 2022. The law was introduced to provide a mechanism for voluntary liquidation of a solvent corporate person.

Luckin Coffee Inc., said on Monday that it had emerged from bankruptcy proceedings, two years after an accounting fraud derailed the coffee chain's business, Reuters reported. Founded in 2017, Xiamen-based Luckin had positioned itself as a homegrown challenger to U.S. coffee giant Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O), but the much-hyped company almost collapsed in 2020 after findings that about 2.2 billion yuan ($337.31 million) in 2019 sales was fabricated.

Sri Lanka’s politics have been dominated for much of the past two decades by a single family. Now a deepening economic crisis is threatening the Rajapaksa clan’s grip on power, the Wall Street Journal reported. Public dissent has been growing in the island nation of 22 million as energy shortages have led the country to resort to rolling blackouts and Sri Lankans have waited for hours in lines to obtain basic goods such as cooking gas and medicine. Dwindling foreign-currency reserves have left the country struggling to pay for imports and on the verge of a sovereign-debt default.

China's factory inflation slowed but beat expectations in March, official data showed on Monday, as the country grapples with cost pressures caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and persistent supply chain bottlenecks, Reuters reported. The producer price index (PPI) increased 8.3% year-on-year, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), easing from 8.8% growth in February but beating a forecast for a 7.9% rise in a Reuters poll. While the year-on-year PPI rise was the slowest since April 2021, the monthly increase of 1.1% was the fastest pace in five months.

Oil resumed its decline as China’s virus resurgence worsened, raising concerns about demand from the world’s biggest crude importer, Bloomberg News reported. West Texas Intermediate futures slid below $96 a barrel after climbing 2.3% on Friday, the first gain in four sessions. Virus cases continue to rise in Shanghai and there is no clarity on when restrictions will be lifted. The flare-up has led to disruptions at ports and prompted some refiners to trim operating rates.

Shanghai reported nearly 25,000 locally transmitted COVID-19 infections on Sunday and sought to assure locked-down residents of China's most populous city that supply bottlenecks affecting availability of food and other items would ease, Reuters reported. Streets remained largely silent in the city of 26 million people as curbs under its "zero tolerance" policy allow only healthcare workers, volunteers, delivery personnel or those with special permission to move freely.

Once conduits for hundreds of millions of dollars looted from 1MDB, a group of offshore entities are being repurposed to try to track down the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund’s stolen money, Bloomberg News reported. Three British Virgin Islands-based companies linked to 1MDB on Tuesday filed for chapter 15 bankruptcy in Florida, utilizing the section of the U.S. code that allows foreign debtors to bring proceedings in the states. Their aim is to recover a portion of the $8.5 billion allegedly stolen from 1MDB, some of which may be in the U.S., the companies said.

Asia boasts some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, but the region that’s keen for more investments accounts for only a fraction of the global private credit market, Bloomberg News reported. From restrictions on foreign investment in India and China to Japan’s ultra-low returns, the mixed environment means investors face a fragmented if potentially lucrative market. The legacy of the Asia financial crisis means there’s a wariness of hot money flows, while currency volatility that may prompt costly hedging is a particular headache for debt investors.