Do we need financial institutions to be so highly leveraged (that is, carrying so much debt relative to equity)?

Even so, ensuring transparency and disclosure cannot fully address heavily debt laden leveraged buy outs, which would still be objectionable.

These are highly leveraged businesses, typically funding their balance sheets with no more than 5 equity (and thus 95 debt).

These leveraged buy outs leave the company saddled with debt and interest payments, its workers are laid off, and its assets are sold.

Eventually, an over leveraged world is going to have to find a way to cut debt burdens down to size, and it won t all be pretty.

In several countries, debt financed housing booms have left households and companies over leveraged and governments have reduced deficits to contain their own debt. As a result, there are likely to be too few investors and too many savers.

Investment banks commitments to leveraged buyouts became liabilities.

Germany s banks are leveraged at 32 times their assets.

But consider the way in which the term debt (the original sin against God, with Satan as the great loan shark) has become leverage, a metaphor from engineering that has turned the classical injunction against getting into debt into a virtual duty to be highly leveraged.

Given that the largest part of the industry (60 ) is based on leveraged buy outs and extreme debt, it seems only reasonable to demand that they honor the transparency and tax rules accepted by everyone else.

The second question is how to constrain leveraged growth in the future.

The partnerships have leveraged additional funding from the Government of the Netherlands.

Executives in highly leveraged institutions should be paid more, because they bear more risk.

We leveraged that 10,000 seed grant more than 300 times into a 3 million park.

The crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in history.

Many homebuilders are near bankrupt, as are some hedge funds and other highly leveraged institutions.

Eastern Europe has its problems, which are likely to impact Western Europe s highly leveraged banks.

But its revenues and expenditures were in part determined by a highly leveraged real estate bubble.

They can take on more risk running a more highly leveraged business with less shareholder capital.

There is little excuse for Iceland, which essentially turned itself into a highly leveraged hedge fund.

The titans of Wall Street and the City of London were exposed as hugely over leveraged.

But do we really want to see the US leveraged up to its ears again? Probably not.

The legacy of excess real estate capacity and over leveraged households makes recovery all the more difficult.

Eurozone banks became among the world s most over leveraged and the worst affected by the crash of 2008.

Instead, they focused exclusively on US foreign debt, ignoring household debt (mortgage and consumer debt), public debt, business debt, and financial debt.

Deleveraging by highly leveraged firms such as hedge funds will lead them to sell illiquid assets in illiquid markets.

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls.

Emerging economies have watched the leveraged power of investors distort the price formation process in crisis stricken advanced economies.

The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries.

This memorandum of understanding has leveraged additional funding for water for Asian cities from the Government of the Netherlands.

In other words, they would not wrap themselves up in their institutions equity and the leveraged products they were selling.

Trade unions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere have long pointed to the damage caused by leveraged buy outs.

Meanwhile, the continuing problems at European banks are a stark reminder that operating highly leveraged, thinly capitalized firms is incredibly risky.

Debt sustainability and debt relief

More debt relief encompassing more countries and more debt (including bilateral debt) is needed.

Then there is the exposure of banks and other financial institutions to rising losses on loans that financed reckless leveraged buy outs (LBOs).

The stock market is the first logical place to look, as it is a highly leveraged investment and has a history of bubbles.

To the extent that banks and other highly leveraged financial institutions hold them, the bursting bubbles could cause bankruptcies and financial market breakdown.

Equity based awards, coupled with the highly leveraged capital structure of banks, tie executives compensation to a leveraged bet on the value of banks assets. As Holger Spamann and I show in our research, executive payoffs should be tied to the long term value delivered not only to shareholders, but also to other contributors to banks capital.

Unsustainable private debt problems must be resolved by defaults, debt reductions, and conversion of debt into equity.

Within the United Nations system, many agencies have leveraged the events of the last year to start new, or to highlight existing, road safety activities.

Debt

The country simply cannot keep on piling debt upon debt.

Fifth, debt burdens that cannot be eased by growth, savings, or inflation must be rendered sustainable through orderly debt restructuring, debt reduction, and conversion of debt into equity.

As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue, recoveries from crises that result from over leveraged balance sheets are slow and typically resistant to traditional macroeconomic stimulus.