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Britain’s vote yesterday to leave the European Union has set in motion an unprecedented and unpredictable process that threatens turbulence and potential crisis — for Britain, for Europe and for the global economy, the New York Times reported today. Of most immediate consequence, Britain’s vote to leave Europe sent global markets on a wild descent. Investors gaped at this major refashioning of the global landscape and decided it looked perilous — or at least so pockmarked with uncertainty that they preferred to pull their money out of riskier corners like stock markets. Few expect that Britain’s departure from Europe will set off a full financial crisis like the one seen after the collapse of the investment banking giant Lehman Brothers in 2008. The British pound plummeted, reaching depths not seen since 1985 — well below the value at the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, and the euro dropped.

Brazil's Oi SA, a telecommunications company that recently filed the largest bankruptcy in the country's history, is seeking court protection in the U.S. to shield its assets from an affiliate of hedge fund Aurelius Capital Management LP, one of its holdout bondholders, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. Oi and several affiliates sought chapter 15 protection on Tuesday with a debt load of $19 billion. A day earlier, the troubled telecom firm filed for the equivalent of chapter 11 in Brazil after an out-of-court restructuring proposal collapsed. If a judge approves Oi's chapter 15 request, the company would receive the benefits of U.S. bankruptcy law, which halt lawsuits and block creditors from seizing assets while it focuses on restructuring at home. Oi has dollar-denominated bonds and says many of its contracts and licenses, including those concerning undersea cables and satellite services, are governed by U.S. law.

Oi SA filed for bankruptcy protection on 65 billion reais ($19 billion) in debt — a Brazilian record — after failing to reach an agreement with creditors, the last straw following a series of mergers and leadership changes that failed to help the phone company get on solid financial footing, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Brazil’s fourth-largest wireless company sought protection from creditors so it could keep serving customers, the company said in a filing yesterday. Talks with creditors had stalled last week after some board members disagreed with a plan by bondholders to swap debt for equity, giving them 95 percent of the company and leaving current shareholders with a 5 percent stake.

The figure of $2.4 trillion is the amount that people around the world claim they lost when Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2014, after huge, unexplained losses of the volatile digital currency Bitcoin, the New York Times reported today. As with most of the people who lost money with Bernard L. Madoff, the investment manager who was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme, most of those who put their Bitcoin in Mt. Gox will be disappointed: The Japanese trustee overseeing the case said yesterday that only $91 million in assets has been tracked down to distribute to claimants — a small portion of the more than $500 million in assets that Mt. Gox claimed it had in the weeks before it went bankrupt in February 2014, and a tiny portion of the amount that claimants have requested. Bitcoin experts and law enforcement officials have spent over two years trying to figure out how hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins disappeared from the Mt. Gox exchange. There have been lots of conspiracy theories but few solid answers. The amount that claimants have requested from the Mt. Gox bankruptcy estate is extremely high, given that all the Bitcoins in the world today are worth about $7 billion, or 0.3 percent of the $2.4 trillion being claimed.

India’s parliament passed a bill to overhaul archaic bankruptcy laws, taking Prime Minister Narendra Modi a step closer to fulfilling his pledge to make it easier to do business in the world’s fastest growing major economy, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The upper house on Wednesday approved the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act days after it was cleared in the lower house. The law will unify more than four overlapping sets of rules and aims to slash time taken to wind up a dying company or recover dues from a defaulter. The bill’s passage is one of the biggest steps in India’s battle to clean up $117 billion of stressed assets. The inability to shut loss-making companies and collect on dues had locked up funds at banks and damped lending and investment. The speed at which the bill was approved shows that battling bad debt is "on top of the government’s agenda," Varun Gupta, a partner at KPMG India, said in a statement. “The Code comes as a relief to workers and employees who are left unpaid by defaulting companies." Creditors in India recover about 25.7 cents on the dollar in the 4.3 years that it takes to resolve insolvency, World Bank data show, compared with 80.4 cents in the U.S. after less than half that time. The new law prescribes 180 days and empowers agencies to sell the creditor’s assets to repay debtors.