Now that the long boom has ended and harder times have returned, the gloss has been rubbed off sterling as well as the economy.
Despite generalized anxiety among the chattering class about an end to the long boom, whether from consumer or business retrenchment or a combination of the two, the bulls are holding their own.
South Korea has long made its investment and savings plans on the assumption of double-digit interest rates: not since the long boom began in the 1960s has the cost of borrowing fallen below 10%.
When compared with average wages, prices are at levels seen in the mid-1990s, long before the boom.
The Jan. 9 collapse in Queens didn't cause any life-threatening injuries, but three workers had to be extricated from beneath fallen machinery after the 170-foot-long boom fell and mowed down part of the building's wooden framework, according to officials and witnesses.
Although relocation costs for crews and equipment are expected to eat into the margin in North America in Q1 2012, the shift will help companies boost revenues in the long term by riding on the oil boom in the Bakken shale.
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So long as the boom lasts, America's mild economic anxieties will pale next to Japan's.
Yet, surprisingly, this turned out to be the beginning of a long boom.
Chances are that such a system can continue to function well, at least as long as the oil boom lasts.
Moreover, the decades-long commodity boom shows no sign of abating.
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First, they were primarily veteran investors who have been investing at least as long as the recent boom-bust real estate cycle that peaked in 2006 and bottomed out in 2012.
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Stora, which is one of the world's largest forestry groups, has long been plagued by the boom-bust cycle in the paper industry.
The flagship Titan 5500, introduced in 1991, came just at the cusp of a huge capital spending boom from the Baby Bells and long distance carriers.
Continued delay now leaves a long boom as the only time to control spending.
The long-running housing market boom could turn out to be a speculative bubble whose bursting damages economic confidence and growth.
In the long run, a baby boom would be even more popular.
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It is hard, of course, to feel too sorry for the Fed's Alan Greenspan, who enjoyed rock-star-like levels of popularity in the late 1990s, when America happily handed him the credit for its long economic boom.
Long before we run out of the cheapest shale oils that are now fueling the current American oil boom, and long before bio-engineers convince bacteria to excrete oil, hydrocarbon engineers will perfect cheap coal-to-liquids. (For a measured technical exploration of all this, see the National Academy of Sciences report.) The latter will unleash another boom.
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The SDMI deal means you will see more digital music players on store shelves in time for Christmas, when the music industry hopes to start cashing in, at long last, on the Internet-music boom.
Despite these problems and the dwindling time, bonuses may still be a viable way for some companies to hold onto their crucial year-2000 workers -- especially those workers who have been with the company for long enough that they didn't benefit from the recent boom in year-2000 salaries.
The two-decade-long Internet boom has created a huge demand for land in Silicon Valley, pushing up real estate prices.
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Nevertheless, trying to scoop the froth from the commodity boom looks justified in the struggle to ensure more balanced long-term growth.
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At dinner with a group of journalists, U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers was similarly unhelpful about how long the U.S. boom could last.
He said pollution from old mines and wells was a common problem long before the recent gas drilling boom, which began about five years ago, adding that the situation is more complicated than many outsiders realize.
Meanwhile, mission specialist Charlie Camarda and pilot Jim Kelly have been continuing to inspect the shuttle for damage sustained during the climb to orbit, using the shuttle's 15m-long boom to photograph and scan Discovery's port wing.
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Romney actually proposes cutting income tax rates across the board for everyone by 20%, including the middle class, as Reagan did in cutting income tax rates by 25% in 1981, which spawned the generation long, 1982 to 2007 boom.
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The experimental data are too scarce and the distinction he draws between the masculine world of risk-taking traders and the more feminised world of asset managers skips over the fact that many supposedly cautious, long-term investors made poor bets in the boom.
The nostalgia is understandable: that pact was followed by a long period of strength for the yen and a boom for much of Asia fuelled by deceptively low-cost dollar borrowing and big inflows of Japanese investment.
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