Clearly, firms find some leverage advantageous in enhancing returns on equity, and thus moderate leverage undoubtedly boosts the capital stock and the level of output. A sophisticated financial system, with its substantial array of instruments to unbundle risks, will tend toward a higher degree of leverage at any given level of underlying economic risk.
What the above statistics reveal is that the frequency, volume and the gravity of instances of fraud across various sectors, particularly in the financial sector, has gone up tremendously over the past few years.