On top of that, HTA maintains a conservative balance sheet, with total leverage of only 31% at the end of the third quarter.

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Regulators in Switzerland have introduced a new capital regime for UBS and Credit Suisse, the country's two biggest banks, which restricts their total leverage as well as measuring their risk-weighted assets.

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Fund managers are copying the success of Bill Gross and the Pimco Total Return fund, which uses leverage.

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Since the middle of 2007, Morgan Stanley has raised about twenty billion dollars in new capital and cut in half its leverage ratio the total value of its assets divided by its capital.

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The main complaint is for a higher leverage ratio that will measure actual equity against total assets.

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Wells also boasts a Tier 1 capital ratio of 11.5%, total capital ratio of 14.51% and Tier 1 leverage ratio of 9.4% to end the third quarter.

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And it is to ask the question whether the global financial system, and the economies of developed countries like Britain, would be in such dire straights if banks had been subject to a simple leverage ceiling, limiting how much banks could lend in total, irrespective of the nature of their loans, as a multiple of their capital.

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To maximize leverage from Federal investments, the NIB would finance no more than 50 percent of the total costs of any project.

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This sort of structure would provide leverage relative to traditional direct lending by EFSF in that given a relatively low probability of default, the total debt that could be insured would be larger than the total that could be lent directly.

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