Airbus announced plans to halt operations at its plants in France and Spain for four days as the coronavirus crisis spread from battered airlines to the manufacturing sector, The Irish Times reported. The most serious across-the-board disruption in Airbus production since a strike at then British partner BAE Systems in 1989 pushed its shares down 7 per cent as a rebound in other European shares quickly faltered.

British chancellor Rishi Sunak on Tuesday announced state loan guarantees worth £330 billion (€363 billion) along with a further £20 billion of financial handouts to help struggling businesses cope with the economic catastrophe caused by the rapid spread of coronavirus in the UK, The Irish Times reported. The UK chancellor said the rescue package – which comes on top of £7 billion in financial support for businesses announced in last week’s budget – included a one-year break from business rates as well as government grants of up to £25,000 for struggling retailers and pubs.

Supermarket shelves are being cleared and in financial markets, cash is the only precious commodity, the Financial Times reported. The hoarding of cash by banks, investors and companies illustrates the vast wave of deleveraging that is taking place across financial markets with the echoes of 2008 getting louder and louder. The real economy and financial system are joined at the hip. Financial market dislocations have prompted emergency rate cuts by central banks, actions that have done little to ease financial stress.

As Italy confronts the ravages of an unexpected threat in the coronavirus, fears are intensifying that the economic damage could trigger a far more familiar danger — a banking crisis, the International New York Times reported. Italy’s banks and their formidable piles of bad loans have long constituted a central worry in an economy that has not grown in more than a decade. The nation’s lenders are at once big enough, sufficiently integrated with the world, and adequately shaky to pose a constant menace to the global financial system.

Italy is set to increase the taxpayer bill for keeping bankrupt airline Alitalia SpA aloft to more than 2.1 billion euros ($2.3 billion) over about three years, and the spending is unlikely to stop there, Bloomberg News reported. A new 600 million-euro loan included in a coronavirus stimulus package being discussed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s cabinet, is part of a plan to re-nationalize the loss-making carrier, according to the latest draft of the document. That’s double what was initially planned, people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

Production lines fell silent across Europe on Monday. Factories across the region were mothballed. Manufacturers fought to contain the damage of an unprecedented loss of business, the Financial Times reported. As the coronavirus spread, whole countries entered lockdown. Carmakers one after another announced work stoppages as the industry faced its worst disruption in a decade.

Debenhams, the British department store group that went through two insolvency processes last year, has asked landlords for an immediate five-month rent holiday because of the likely impact of coronavirus on trading, the Financial Times reported.

Germany plans to ease bankruptcy rules to give companies hit by the coronavirus more time to secure financial aid, Bloomberg News reported. The Federal Ministry of Justice is preparing legislation to suspend a rule that forces companies to arrange help or file for insolvency within three weeks of getting into difficulties. The waiver, previously introduced to help businesses hurt by severe flood damage, will be restricted to companies affected by the outbreak that are eligible for government aid or are securing other forms of refinancing, the ministry said in a statement Monday.

Europe must provide liquidity to companies hit by the coronavirus outbreak to avoid a banking crisis, a group of German economists said on Friday, Reuters reported. The warning came as Germany’s top bankers headed to Berlin to confer with the finance minister on possible measures. The economists, affiliated with the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, said a liquidity crunch in the economy could result in a new banking crisis. “Only coordinated fiscal policy measures have the potential to reduce the default risks of banks and thus stabilize the financial system,” they wrote.

King Felipe VI of Spain said on Sunday that he was renouncing his personal inheritance from his father, Juan Carlos, who has been implicated in a Swiss offshore account investigation, the International New York Times reported. King Felipe is also stripping his father of his stipend, in an apparent bid to sever any financial linkage between the Spanish royal household and the former monarch. The announcement came as King Felipe has himself risked getting entangled in the financial scandals centering on his father.