In railway circles, the practice of substituting cheap materials for real ones was common enough to rate its own expression: touliang huanzhu robbing the beams to put in the pillars.

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Despite what many Americans would like to believe, America's trade gap is not simply an expression of its faster growth rate.

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The resulting rate is used in basically two ways: as an expression of global credit risk (rates go up when the financial system is perceived to be in danger, like in the fall of 2008) and as a benchmark interest rate for millions of contracts around the world.

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