leverage - intransitive verb (Business World) To speculate financially (
or cause someone else to do so), using borrowed capital and relying on the profits made being greater
than the interest payable. Etymology: The verb is formed on the noun
leverage, which originally meant the action or power of a lever, but acquired a figurative use in the nineteenth century. In the 1930s a specialized meaning developed in US financial circles: the ratio of a company's debt to its equity, which
could be used to maximize returns on an investment. Although
leverage is normally pronounced /--/ in British English, the verb reflects in its pronunciation the specialized American sense of the noun from which it derives. History and Usage:
Leverage was
first used in US financial
writing in the thirties, but remained limited to the technical vocabulary of finance for
several decades. The increasing involvement of ordinary people in the stock
market , as well as the adventurousness of investment generally, brought it into the public eye in the eighties, but it remains principally an American word. The verbal noun leveraging is used for the practice of speculating in this way; the adjective
leveraged is applied to companies and transactions based on borrowed capital (see also
buyout ). In the late eighties, after a decade of leveraging,
there was a widespread move to de
leverage in the US and UK markets. The corporation discovered that the more it borrowed, the higher the earnings and the higher the
stock , so it began to
leverage. 'A. Smith' Supermoney (1972), p.
209 Safeway's announcement that it intends to
deleverage itself via a $160 million
public share issue was heralded as the start of a trend. Observer 18 Feb. 1990, p. 53
