JAPAN

Government to Use Public Funds to Cover Thrift’s Deposits: After a day of emergency meetings, Japanese government officials agreed to use public funds to cover the deposits of the troubled Cosmo Credit Union, the Tokyo area’s largest thrift, said a senior Tokyo Metropolitan Government official. The use of government money to guarantee all Cosmo’s deposits could mark the beginning of a move by Japanese officials to resolve the country’s long-running banking crisis. Japanese financial institutions are saddled with as much as $567 billion in bad loans left over from the speculative boom of Japan’s “bubble economy” of the late 1980s.