He found $417m from redundancies, spending cuts, better debt collection and other reforms including consolidations of police and fire departments.
Most people believe that fiscal consolidations are helpful in the long run.
(There were also many smaller consolidations; see left-hand chart).
Its army of researchers provide useful guidance: a recent IMF paper suggests that steady fiscal consolidations, rather than the sharp ones the EC favours, work better.
The general rule of fund-management consolidations is that they may be a good deal for the companies, but they rarely bring much benefit to investors, for two reasons.
And a paper published by Policy Exchange, a right-of-centre British think-tank, concluded that successful debt consolidations had put 80% of the emphasis on spending cuts (see table).Some of the more successful deficit-cutting programmes were accompanied by falls in inflation and interest rates.
Vance Scott of A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, expects a wave of consolidations among utilities.Yet Mr Rogers adds a key motivation: both he and Paul Anderson, Duke's boss, believe that government policies "will inevitably lead to a carbon-constrained world".
And when the authors broaden their analysis to include all large fiscal consolidations (not just the biggest five or ten), their results are once again pretty much the same.
Industry rivals, employees of the two carriers and even consumer advocates all potential losers from the combination expressed mild misgivings but concluded that such consolidations were a sign of the times.
But is it right to claim, as Mr Trichet and other devotees of "expansionary fiscal consolidations" do, that belt-tightening can actually aid growth in the short term?
Moreover, it promises to achieve those savings via the murky world of streamlining, efficiencies and administrative consolidations, rather than by defined cuts.The federal government can afford a much gentler pace of fiscal contraction than Ontario can because of growth.
