Enter the LeverAge. Risk as a reward mechanism.

Turning others money into your loan guarantee, as collateral to borrow 20 or 40 times your assets. Do this in a way that to make it appear as an asset class, and you get to call yourself an investor. Otherwise you are just another fool in big debt.

We have turned the leverage down since summer. Wall Street is issuing proclamations about their reduction, about the deleveraging they have done. How much they have unwound.

Leveraging is a finance term, not one used by policy and budget types, but consider the US debt, the stimulus package is a leverage of less than ONE. Currently the best of big Wall Street brag about a leverage of 15 to 1. If our best firms were running the government, we would indeed be in dire straits. Remember, the leverage of the Financial Fiasco has used up, vaporized, more than 55 years of global domestic product. This was power, more power than the market could manage. The children of shipwreck island couldn’t do anything but light the fuse. They had no way of knowing what would happen. Now we all do. Again.