All this could easily have been levered into the script of Martin Scorsese's mafia classic Goodfellas.
The measure draws on a simple idea: any fund can, in theory, be levered up or down so that the volatility of its total return is equal to that of a chosen benchmark, such as the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.
But they particularly hurt investors that levered up in the good times and now have to keep creditors at bay.Crushing debts suffocated Babcock & Brown, an Australian investor that went into voluntary administration in March.
But it is just about possible if he levered up his bets with borrowed money or supercharged them with derivatives (which he is known to have used to reduce volatility).
"Our investment has directly levered in another £60m of private-sector investment," says Neil Kemsley, an MSIF director.
Mr DeLay levered him into his current position, as majority whip, but Mr Blunt is not as good as his master at managing the House floor.
The belief that markets were self-regulating allowed staggering volumes of highly levered and opaque cross-border exposures to build up.
If North Korea is to be levered out of the nuclear business, it will have to be persuaded that no economic assistance, or oil, will flow until the weapons go.North Korea may be calculating differently: that the worse its misbehaviour, the bigger the bribe and the better the chance of keeping its weapons into the bargain.
This time around the faultline may be emerging market corporates which have happily levered up in recent years.Meanwhile, equity markets may have caught wind of some troubling signs for America's recovery.
Senior American officials over the Unscom years (1991-98), and famously Madeleine Albright as Bill Clinton's secretary of state, argued openly and with feeling (if unhelpfully at the time) that sanctions on Iraq should not be lifted until Mr Hussein, a serial re-offender, was levered from power.
