And in recent years, Apple, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants have undertaken efforts, voluntarily and under pressure from groups like Greenpeace, to slash their massive electricity consumption and secure power from renewable energy sources.

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Although the firm had pinned its hopes on international growth, it was China's effort to boost domestic consumption through a massive fiscal stimulus that prevented a worse outcome.

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Mr Dasgupta argues that this distortion of trade amounts to a massive subsidy of rich-world consumption paid by the world's poorest people.

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It is estimated that efficient white light LEDs, if successfully developed and widely implemented, could have a massive effect on reducing global energy consumption and C02 emissions.

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While Herman Cain wants to replace the entire federal tax code with his 9-9-9 consumption tax and Rick Perry favors a massive tax cut, Romney would do little more than tinker around the edges of the current law.

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That is a massive amount of excess overhead in hardware, real estate, power consumption and productivity.

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In our global economy, the massive consumer surplus generated by free services is primarily spent on the consumption of imported goods.

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As these and other policies boosted savings by constraining consumption, other policies, like those aimed at engineering massive loans to capital-intensive manufacturing at very low interest rates, forced rapid growth in domestic production.

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That instead of a multi-family boom happening in the spring, we will get a massive collapse in shadow inventory sometime later in the 2012 and a resulting rise in personal consumption expenditures and residential investment.

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