What Do You Get When You Combine a 2008 Housing Bubble, a 2000 Dot-Com Bubble and a 1998 Leverage Crisis?

A leverage love story

Every great bubble eventually invents new ways to finance itself.

At first investors simply buy assets because they expect prices to rise. Then someone realizes those assets can be borrowed against to buy even more of them. Soon suppliers finance customers, future obligations migrate off balance sheets, and tomorrow's valuation becomes today's collateral.