The transaction will only turn out to be important if it is the priming of a financial pump that then gushes a flow of Chinese money into British roads, rail, hospitals and the other things that our indebted government is struggling to afford.

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The pump priming of US financial markets will die an honorourable death come June 30, 2011.

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The Conservatives are opposed to the idea of pump priming initiatives which are not clearly funded by savings elsewhere.

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It signals a winding down of the pump-priming policy brought in to maintain high economic growth in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

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My main online tool for priming the pump for the launch of the book was the blog.

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The government also has plenty of scope for pump-priming after achieving a surplus for the past four years running.

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Other pump-priming measures include increased social security spending, new investment in agriculture and a package of inducements and tax credits to encourage exports.

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The string of measures was a strange mixture of well-meaning steps at social reform, half-baked schemes for quasi-socialist industrial planning, regulation to protect consumers, welfare programs to help the hardest hit, government support for the cartelization of industry, higher wages for some, lower wages for others, on the one hand government pump priming, on the other public economy.

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