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We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.

When you buy anything with lots of leverage, it does not require a whole lot to go wrong to lose it all.

Home purchases that are very highly leveraged or unaffordable subject the borrower and lender to a great deal of risk. Moreover, even in a strong economy, unforeseen life events and risks in local real estate markets make highly leveraged borrowers vulnerable.

The degree of leverage now being reversed is staggering, and the underlying global imbalances - notably between the savers and the spenders - will require long and painful adjustment.

The financial system has to be regulated, we have to end with the tax havens, and it's necessary that the central banks in the world should control a little bit the banks' financing because they cannot bypass a certain range of leverage.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

I have serious concerns about whether it's prudent to give any foreign country substantial leverage over the U.S. economy. Instead of spending $80 billion on important programs here at home, we're sending this money overseas just to pay interest on our debt.