It shrunk its board from 125 members to 11, and reduced the number of committees from 23 to 4. It then turned to the power structures of the national governing bodies, believing that many had grown comparably bloated and inefficient.
On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.
It has shrunk its balance sheet by €1 trillion in the past two years, even as the Fed increased its own by $1 trillionn.
The firm also noted that it had shrunk its balance sheet by nearly a quarter and reduced leverage, further comforting investors.
But it specializes in customized parts ordered by the dozens rather than the thousands, and it has shrunk its delivery time on most orders to just one day.
While the firm's traditional investment banking franchise has emerged strongly from the crisis topping JPMorgan and Goldman in some of its businesses it has shrunk its fixed-income division and taken piles of money off the table in its broader institutional securities business.
It has three defining characteristics: it is shockingly unequal, as a deliberate choice of its rulers; it looks back to the past rather than investing in its future; and it has shrunk its public services for the benefit of its distended, crisis-prone banking sector.
It has shrunk its search field based on satellite tracking data and analysis of weather and currents, but it still covers an area of 600,000 sq km (230,000 sq miles), roughly the size of Spain and Portugal.
