COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s stock market halted trading after a nearly 13 percent plunge Monday as the island nation’s beleaguered government faces new pressure to resign from influential Buddhist leaders over a crippling economic crisis.

The country’s worst downturn since independence in 1948 has brought widespread hardships to its 22 million people, with months of regular blackouts and acute shortages of food and fuel.

Monday was the first morning of trade on the Colombo bourse after a two-week break, during which the government imposed a record interest rate hike and defaulted on its $51 billion foreign debt. But trading was halted after a frenzied market sell-off, and called off for the day entirely when a brief resumption failed to dampen the downward slide, with the local S&P index finishing 12.6 percent down.

Equities had already shed nearly 40 percent of their value since January and the local currency has fallen by a similar amount against the greenback in the past month.