But the regulatory system was largely a bystander during the build-up of leverage and the erosion of credit standards in the boom and has been powerless as the boom has turned to bust.
Zhiwei Zhang, an economist at the investment bank Nomura, warned in a report last Friday that "China is displaying the same three symptoms that Japan, the U.S. and parts of Europe all showed before suffering financial crises: a rapid build-up of leverage, elevated property prices and a decline in potential growth".
With Britain already requesting the repatriation of some powers from Brussels, he may be trying to build up his bargaining leverage with France and Germany, which oppose Britain's demands.
"They are trying to build up leverage for something, politically and psychologically, for negotiations with the United States," said Ivan P. Hall, author of "Cartels of the Mind" (Norton, 1997), an exploration of Japanese protectionism.
What Aereo is hoping, essentially, is that it can build up enough of a paying user base just by offering on-demand broadcast TV content to give it the leverage it needs to make media companies budge.
Shilling: We're going through a massive de-leveraging of two sectors of the economy that built up huge leverage over the past three decades.
Monitoring leverage provides information about how risk builds up during booms as leverage rises and how crises start when leverage on new loans sharply declines.
Hezbollah may block talks with Lebanon or use them to buy time to build up its armaments and political leverage.
Other companies have built up and leveraged their overseas human resources in different ways.
And, this also allows you to build up your credentials in an area of interest to you that can be better leveraged down the road.
