When the global financial crisis brought that boom to an end in 2008, the three were saddled with excess capacity, bloated work forces and investments that they could hardly hope to recoup.
Other shipping lines sell ships when capacity is bloated, and lease them back when needed, to save money.
And bank lending to companies is on the rise, though a good chunk of this is taking over from credit once supplied by capital markets, which have dried up.Crucially, adjustments are happening swiftly in areas that beleaguered companies tackled only slowly during the last slump, such as bloated workforces and excessive capacity.
Today's laptops use about 75% of their own processing capacity to support bloated software applications and the operating system itself.
[Page C1.] Japanese Economy Growing After a Decade of Problems After more than a decade of working off excessive debt, bloated payrolls and overbuilt factory capacity, Japan seems to have addressed its problems and emerged leaner and more competitive, economists say.
Douglas Carswell, who has penned The End of Politics and the Birth of Democracy put the case for the end of "big bloated government" claiming it had outgrown its capacity, for his specialised subject.
His most enduring work, and greatest monument, From Dawn to Decadence, published at the turn of the millennium, when he was 92, is a paean to pessimism that simultaneously dissects the bloated body of western civilisation and marvels at its endless capacity for resurrection.
Though capacity is no longer a problem, rigid labor contracts and bloated payrolls make the power companies inefficient, with the result that residential electricity costs are nearly twice as high on average as in the U.S.
Pakistan's greater significance in Western security calculations bolstered Pakistan's strategic defenses, leading to bloated defense budgets that the country didn't have the resources and capacity to meet.
