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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.
The consumer leverage ratio is the ratio of total household debt to disposable personal income. [1] In the United States these are reported, respectively, by the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce .
Closely related to leveraging, the ratio is also known as risk, gearing or leverage. The two components are often taken from the firm's balance sheet or statement of financial position (so-called book value ), but the ratio may also be calculated using market values for both, if the company's debt and equity are publicly traded , or using a ...
Index numbers are used especially to compare business activity, the cost of living, and employment. They enable economists to reduce unwieldy business data into easily understood terms. In contrast to a cost-of-living index based on the true but unknown utility function, a superlative index number is an index number that can be calculated. [1]
According to Tobin's Q, [4] asset prices can affect economic activity. When prices of assets are high, new productive activity can be stimulated that can lead to over production. Alternatively, when asset prices crash, production may come to a standstill. Therefore, the leverage cycle has the potential to amplify real economic activity.
At the micro-economic level, deleveraging refers to the reduction of the leverage ratio, or the percentage of debt in the balance sheet of a single economic entity, such as a household or a firm. It is the opposite of leveraging , which is the practice of borrowing money to acquire assets and multiply gains and losses.
Operating leverage can also be measured in terms of change in operating income for a given change in sales (revenue). The Degree of Operating Leverage (DOL) can be computed in a number of equivalent ways; one way it is defined as the ratio of the percentage change in Operating Income for a given percentage change in Sales (Brigham 1995, p. 426):
The Net Stable Funding Ratio seeks to calculate the proportion of Available Stable Funding ("ASF"), via equity and certain liabilities, over Required Stable Funding ("RSF") via the assets. Sources of Available Stable Funding includes: customer deposits, long-term wholesale funding (from the interbank lending market), and equity.