The world’s post-coronavirus economic future could depend on mass career migration away from sectors such as retail, entertainment and travel, Japan’s most powerful business leader has warned, the Financial Times reported. Hiroaki Nakanishi, chairman of Hitachi and head of the Keidanren business lobby, told the Financial Times in an interview that propping up businesses during lockdown was not sufficient and governments would need to shift spending away from furloughs towards fundamental economic restructuring.

Japan’s economy sank last quarter into a recession that’s likely to deepen further as households limit spending to essentials and companies cut investment, production and hiring to stay afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Gross domestic product shrank an annualized 3.4% in the three months through March from the previous quarter as exports slid and social distancing crimped consumer spending, Cabinet Office figures showed Monday.

Japan’s Renown Inc, part of Chinese fashion empire Shandong Ruyi, filed for bankruptcy on Friday with 13.9 billion yen ($130 million) in debt, the country’s highest-profile business to collapse amid the coronavirus outbreak, Reuters reported. Renown, a century-old textile company which sells clothes under brands such as Arnold Palmer, Hiroko Koshino and D’Urban, confirmed it had filed for bankruptcy protection after a month-long closure of department stores brought the already-struggling business to its knees. It joins a list of global fashion companies, including retailers such as J.

SoftBank has warned of a writedown of more than ¥1tn ($9.6bn) on investments held outside its huge Vision Fund, as the coronavirus crisis piles new pressure on founder Masayoshi Son’s bet on struggling WeWork, the Financial Times reported. The Japanese technology group’s widened loss forecast, announced on Thursday, came just two weeks after SoftBank flagged a ¥1.8tn blow to its $100bn, Saudi-backed technology fund, underscoring the depth of its exposure to the market turmoil sparked by the pandemic.

Japan’s long-suffering regional banks face the biggest threat to their survival since the 1990s post-bubble malaise as the coronavirus hammers their few remaining profit drivers, Bloomberg News reported. Analysts and investors are predicting some local lenders will eventually be delisted or bailed out by the government as bad loans climb and investment income evaporates in the wake of the crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced 217 listed Japanese companies to warn of lower profits and sales in the coming year, an increase of 35% from less than a week ago, researcher Teikoku Databank said, Bloomberg News reported. All told, the forecast revisions represent 1.74 trillion yen ($16 billion) in lost sales, the firm said on Thursday. Japan’s earnings season for the fiscal year and quarter ending in March usually goes into full swing in late April.

SoftBank Group Corp. forecast a record 1.35 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) operating loss for the fiscal year ended in March, a sign of how badly Masayoshi Son’s bets on technology startups have been battered in recent months, Bloomberg News reported. The Japanese company expects to record a 1.8 trillion yen loss from its Vision Fund and another 800 billion yen in losses from SoftBank’s own investments. It has written down the value of investments in companies, including office-rental startup WeWork and satellite operator OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy last month.

Just when it seemed impossible to do more, along came the coronavirus, spurring the Bank of Japan to double-down on its already massive market operations, Bloomberg News reported. The BOJ’s presence is now felt in virtually every corner of Japan’s financial markets and its actions continue to shape global money flows.

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.

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.