Japanese industrial conglomerate Toshiba Corp expects a bigger full-year loss than previously anticipated, amid mounting restructuring costs after a $1.3 billion accounting scandal, Reuters reported. Toshiba said on Thursday it now expected a net loss of 710 billion yen ($6 billion) compared with a previously expected loss of 550 billion yen. Chief Executive Masashi Muromachi told a press conference that Toshiba had lowered its expectations to fully reflect possible downside risks to its business.

Faced with sluggish domestic growth, Japan’s megabanks are expanding their role in financing global mergers and acquisitions, which hit a record level this year, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Japanese banks have long ranked among the world’s top cross-border lenders, and have lent many billions of dollars to Japanese companies also seeking growth abroad through acquisitions. Now the banks are increasingly financing deals that don't involve their compatriot companies.

The Bank of Japan still has policy options to continue its unprecedented monetary easing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in an interview days after the central bank announced it wouldn’t expand its main stimulus target, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. "I think they still have policies they can pursue," Suga said yesterday when asked about concerns the program could be reaching its limits.

Japan avoided falling into the second recession of the Abenomics era over the summer, as stronger-than-expected capital spending helped the economy grow in the third quarter, revised figures show, The Wall Street Journal reported. Japan’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of a nation’s economic activity, grew 1.0% in the third quarter from the prior three-month period on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, the Cabinet Office said Tuesday. Previously it had estimated that the economy shrank 0.8% on that basis in the third quarter.

The Bank of Japan kept its monetary stimulus programme unchanged on Thursday, with Governor Haruhiko Kuroda holding fast to his view that the corporate capital expenditure vital to economic growth will pick up - suggesting that no new monetary easing is imminent, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The BOJ offered a slightly more cautious view on inflation expectations - or how the public perceives future price moves - than at last month's meeting, underscoring its concerns over a lack of success in nudging companies into boosting wages and investment.

Japan, more than many other developed countries, needs everything to go right for its economy to grow, the International New York Times reported. Its population and work force are shrinking. Once-big industries like consumer electronics are retrenching under pressure from lower-cost rivals. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won power three years ago on a promise to accelerate Japan’s economic metabolism, but despite some notable successes — joblessness is low and many large companies are earning record profits — a broad increase in growth and incomes remains elusive.

Japan has slid back into recession for the fifth time in seven years amid uncertainty about the state of the global economy, putting policymakers under growing pressure to deploy new stimulus measures to support a fragile recovery, The Guardian reported. The world’s third-largest economy shrank an annualised 0.8% in July-September, more than a market forecast for a 0.2% contraction, government data showed on Monday. That followed a revised 0.7% contraction in the previous quarter, fulfilling the technical definition of a recession which is two back-to-back quarterly contractions.

Japan’s central bank said on Friday that the economic outlook was worsening, but its governor said that the stimulus measures already in place, while slow to take effect, were enough for now. Even with the benchmark interest rate at virtually zero and the bank already buying up trillions of yen of government debt, some economists had expected the bank to ratchet up its efforts in response to a softening Japanese economy. But the Bank of Japan’s rate-setting board voted 8 to 1 to leave its monetary program unchanged.

Shares of Daiichi Chuo KK, a Japanese shipping line, were halted from trading in Tokyo after the Nikkei newspaper reported the company may seek bankruptcy protection as early as Tuesday. The company’s liabilities may be about 120 billion yen ($1 billion), the newspaper reported. The Tokyo-based company, which mainly does tramp services carrying bulk cargoes such as iron core, coal and grains, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the Nikkei report. Shares of Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd., the largest shareholder of Daiichi Chuo, slumped as much as 7.4 percent after the report.

Shinzo Abe has vowed to boost the size of Japan’s economy from Y491tn to Y600tn and said his programme of reforms was entering a new, second stage, the Financial Times reported. The Japanese prime minister was speaking after his Liberal Democratic party elected him, unopposed, to a second three-year term as its leader, making him one of the few postwar premiers to head a durable government.