The global economic slowdown has slashed demand for coal, particularly in fast-growing emerging economies, and Bumi's boardroom infighting has been mirrored by a 60 percent fall in the company's share price over the last three years.
But the blast-furnace fires started to go out last year when recession slashed demand for steel and forced ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steelmaker by some distance, to start closing its least efficient plants.
Fracked oil and gas across the central plains of the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska, coupled with oil from Canadian tar sands, has slashed demand for oil imports to the US – resulting in the world market for oil and gas being flooded.
Ireland has been running a small current-account surplus and deficits have generally fallen (though they remain very high in Cyprus and Greece) but they would be far worse if the peripheral economies were not so depressed, which has slashed demand for imports.XXV.XXV
But new emissions standards kicking in this year have slashed demand for older trucks, even though these are grandfathered in under the stricter rules.
Ever since the dot-com meltdown slashed demand for Sun's servers, this quest has acquired a growing sense of urgency.
The culprits: slowing growth in China, a voracious buyer of commodities, and a U.S. housing recession that, he says, will slash demand for building materials like copper and weigh down the global economy.
The likely fall in investment could slice over a percentage point off GDP growth in both 2008 and 2009, according to Ben Broadbent, an economist at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank.A second way in which the housing slump will hurt the economy is by slashing the demand for consumer goods linked to property transactions.
The fall of the Berlin Wall opened low-cost Eastern Europe to Western employers and slashed the demand for Turkish guest workers, especially in Germany.
Now the euro-zone crisis has slashed demand; in January the company gave the plant back to the government for a symbolic $1.
