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In finance, leverage, also known as gearing, is any technique involving borrowing funds to buy an investment.. Financial leverage is named after a lever in physics, which amplifies a small input force into a greater output force, because successful leverage amplifies the smaller amounts of money needed for borrowing into large amounts of profit.
Leveraged funds use what are known as financial derivatives to help boost the fund’s performance. For example: For example: If the benchmark index is up 1 percent, a basic S&P 500 index fund ...
It is a problematic measure of leverage, because an increase in non-financial liabilities reduces this ratio. [3] Nevertheless, it is in common use. In the financial industry (particularly banking), a similar concept is equity to total assets (or equity to risk-weighted assets), otherwise known as capital adequacy.
Company management is responsible for establishing a capital structure for the corporation that makes optimal use of financial leverage and holds the cost of capital as low as possible. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Capital structure is an important issue in setting rates charged to customers by regulated utilities in the United States.
As the debt equity ratio (i.e. leverage) increases, there is a trade-off between the interest tax shield and bankruptcy, causing an optimum capital structure, D/E*. The top curve shows the tax shield gains of debt financing, while the bottom curve includes that minus the costs of bankruptcy.
Leverage is defined as the ratio of the asset value to the cash needed to purchase it. The leverage cycle can be defined as the procyclical expansion and contraction of leverage over the course of the business cycle. The existence of procyclical leverage amplifies the effect on asset prices over the business cycle.
LBOs have become attractive as they usually represent a win–win situation for the financial sponsor and the banks: the financial sponsor can increase the rate of returns on its equity by employing the leverage; banks can make substantially higher margins when supporting the financing of LBOs as compared to usual corporate lending, because the interest chargeable is that much higher.
Image source: The Motley Fool. Synchrony Financial (NYSE: SYF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Jan 28, 2025, 8:00 a.m. ET. Contents: Prepared Remarks. Questions and Answers. Call Participants