leverage

Like consumers, companies can take on too much debt. The debt-to-equity ratio offers one way to tell whether a leveraged business is taking on too much. Here's how you can do the simple math before you invest.

Hedge funds, which experienced sharp drops in assets during the credit crisis, now hold an all-time high of more than $2 trillion in capital, according to a new survey by Hedge Fund Research Inc. The figure is 50% higher than crisis-driven lows reached in the first quarter of 2009.

The investment world's love affair with ETFs continued in 2010, as more than 1,000 funds managed assets of $940 billion. Here's a review of the best and the worst performers, and a few reminders about how to use these investment vehicles safely.

Grocery chain Supervalu reported a net income of 31 cents per share this morning for the last quarter, which ended May 10, a 40% decline year-over-year. An after-tax charge of 12 cents per share that brought the figure down, but the quarter was still a disappointment.

In the late '80s and early '90, more than 1,000 savings & loans failed in a financial crisis that cost the government $220 billion to resolve. By contrast, it looks like TARP will only cost the government $105 billion. So is the current financial crisis only half as bad? Not bloody likely.

Let's not forget that unprecedented government intervention is the only thing keeping the the housing and mortgage markets afloat. This level of support is so massive that many are wondering what will happen when the government finally pulls the plug.

A year after the global financial and credit markets melted down, the U.S. housing market is in a good-news, bad-news equilibrium. The good news: prices in many markets have fallen to pre-bubble valuations, home values nationally have stabilized, sales are rising, mortgage rates are low and loans...

Appearing on CNBC Thursday morning, Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, talked down the importance of the recent unemployment number, instead turning attention to the idea of deleveraging the global economy. Taleb dismissed the list of forecasters and their predictions, because it "did not have anyone...

It's becoming harder and harder to call the financial crisis "just a subprime mortgage crisis." While mass subprime loan defaults would have been enough to create major balance sheet stress for selected U.S. banks (they have), what's becoming increasingly clear as the crisis enters its second...

A recent survey revealed that approximately 27% of gift cards are never redeemed. In 2006, that came to over $8 billion in gifts that ended up going back to retailers. The most common reasons that respondents cited for not using their cards included that they never had time to shop or that they...