On the nature of financial leverage

Abstract

The article presents a translation of some widespread financial terminology into the language of decision theory. For instance, financial leverage can be regarded as an object of choice or a decision. We show how the optics of decision theory allows perceiving the recently introduced metrics of see-through-leverage, which proved to be very useful in understanding the phenomenology of the recent economic crisis. The importance for practical decision making of specification of the statistical regularity of the random phenomena at hand as well as of the rationality class of the decision maker is discussed.