Yet spreads were tightening even as stocks were falling to much lower levels than they are at now (the stockmarket has rallied of late).
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For one thing, East Asia's annual output is now at a much lower level, even if it manages to tick up by a percentage point or two.
This leaves them free to travel and the costs are much lower than 50 or even 30 years ago.
In my native UK (heck, even here in Portugal where wages are much lower) we have self-checkout counters these days.
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Yet however sceptical the public may be about Parliament, the judiciary - even the media itself - think how much lower it would be without a free press.
Low rates are unquestionably stimulating the economy, but even lower rates are unlikely to have much impact.
However, even if the money multiplier were to remain much lower, the M2 money stock would still be much higher than today.
The borrowing binge of the past few years explains why people are having to shell out so much even though interest rates are still far lower than in the early 1990s.
So even though the global music revenues are so much lower than before, what has emerged at the bottom of the revenue trough is a tougher, wiser industry that now has some solid footing on which to launch a digital counteroffensive.
Even if it was 80%, that is much lower than the 100% and more in most of the developed countries.
"So next year we would be starting from a much lower base and have to make even deeper cuts or demand bigger increases in council tax, " he said.
This was a class that simply did not exist in the US and even if it had would have been claiming a much lower portion of the national income as a result of the much lower rents.
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Even in the renewable energy sector, which starts from a much lower base, there has been an almost eight-fold increase in installed capacity over the past decade.
The broadcasters' poll also found that support for Mr Karzai has been falling, although 52% still thought he was doing a good or even excellent job (some analysts say his true support is much lower).
But even an implemented OMT programme is unlikely to push Spanish bond yields much lower, given that eurozone policy makers will want to keep pressure on Madrid.
As you can see in the chart above, over the long haul, returns really don't suffer that much for the more frequently rebalanced portfolios, even though they showed lower average returns over shorter periods.
Lung cancer, however, has a much lower survival rate, so remains the biggest killer, even though falls in smoking rates have reduced its incidence.
For buyers interested in seeing but not purchasing such a product, noticing such a high price point could make much lower ones offered by the same merchant seem accessible, even reasonable.
The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.
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Why did the phone companies cling to expensive switched network standards even as packet-switched voice grew robust enough to deliver acceptable fidelity at a much lower cost per connection?
The recent round of currency devaluations in Asia leaves that region with even greater ability to lower costs to U.S. consumers, putting that much more pressure on U.S.-based companies to cut their own prices.
The best hope for treating more AIDS patients is that drug companies, many of which are already selling their HIV drugs for much lower prices in poor countries, will find ways to make them even cheaper.
We should also keep in mind that Apple, Google, Intel, and others have been investigated since 2009, and recently much more aggressively so, by the DOJ for colluding to maintain and even lower employee salaries by not poaching from one another, thereby creating a market devoid of information regarding true salaries.
Even if the bleeding risk is lower than 5%, it could easily be too much of a risk for many doctors.
That means it had to be much more efficient, lower cost, high volume, and well regarded than even its most optimistic backers probably expected.
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As Blairite ministers acknowledge, raising the state-pension age had been taboo even though it was originally set at 65 in 1925, when pensioner life expectancy was much lower.
And there is the possibility that even much smaller tax increases would be required after accounting for the broader set of benefits associated with lower taxes noted above.
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After all, only 6.5 million of 30 million subscribers have even activated HBO GO, and the number of people sharing their accounts with people outside their household is likely much lower.
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This means that there is a lot of nonconsumption in the tutoring space to launch disruptive innovations that utilize the power of machine tutoring at a much lower price point in a manner far more accessible and convenient than are human tutors to millions or even billions around the world.
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