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Bloomberg Indonesia slashed its growth forecast by more than half as the coronavirus pandemic takes a toll on Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, prompting the government to adopt a series of emergency measures. The economy is now projected to grow 2.3% this year, compared to an initial estimate of 5.3%, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said in Jakarta on Wednesday. Under ...

Bloomberg Bangkok city hall has ordered all restaurants and stores to close from midnight to 5 am, its latest move to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. Apart from the late-night shutdown of businesses, all parks will be closed starting from Thursday to April 30, according to Bangkok Metropolitan Administration Spokesman Pongsakorn Kwanmuang. The shutdown add tiers to state-of-emergency ...

Bloomberg KKR & Co is suspending its planned sale of Goodpack Ltd, a Singaporean provider of intermediate bulk containers, after bids fell short of expectations, according to people familiar with the matter. The coronavirus outbreak has disrupted the sale process, said the people, who asked not to be named as the information is private. The New York-based private equity firm, ...

Bloomberg Walt Disney Co will start its streaming service in India later this week, after a coronavirus lockdown upended its previous plans in one of the world’s biggest emerging markets for online video. The US entertainment giant planned to kick off Disney+ in India at the start of the wildly popular Indian Premier League cricket season on March 29. That ...

Bloomberg China reported 130 people over the past day who were infected with the novel coronavirus but don’t have symptoms, a sign that the group of people who can spread the virus without being detected is sizable. The tally, the first daily count of so-called asymptomatic patients, establishes a new benchmark to measure the scope of the outbreak amid a ...

Bloomberg Peru is moving to fend off economic catastrophe with a record fiscal stimulus and plans for a contingency line of up to $18 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to contain the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The government is putting together a package of economic measures totaling 90 billion soles ($26 billion), including health-care spending, tax breaks ...

Bloomberg Denmark’s central bank drastically cut its forecast for gross domestic product, and now sees a painful recession this year, after the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic brought the economy to a near standstill. GDP will contract somewhere between 3% and 10%, the Copenhagen-based bank said on Wednesday. The bank “has listed three scenarios, illustrating how severely the Danish ...

Bloomberg Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc said it may need to tap into high-interest notes it was trying to avoid drawing down, even after a 536 million-pound ($663 million) capital infusion from a group led by billionaire Lawrence Stroll. The UK luxury carmaker doesn’t have sufficient working capital based on European Securities and Markets Authority rules, because the coronavirus ...

Bloomberg Russia spent more than $40 billion building a war chest of bullion over the past five years. Now, it’s calling it quits. The central bank announced that it would stop buying gold starting April 1, but didn’t explain the move. Analysts say Russia already has a lot of gold stashed in reserves and likely doesn’t need more. Plus, with ...

Bloomberg Johnson & Johnson (J&J) surged after the company said it would begin a $1-billion-plus effort with the US government to develop and manufacture a vaccine against the new coronavirus. J&J will work with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) an arm of US Department of Health and Human Services, to further develop a vaccine the company said it’s ...