The $3.6 Trillion Leveraged Loan Wall of Debt

" The leveraged loan market got accustomed to big numbers over the past decade. There's $3.6 trillion, the amount of leveraged loans made since 2000, according to Thomson Reuters' Loan Pricing Corp. There's 735-fold, the amount of growth between 2003 and 2007 in the volume of collateralized loan obligations -- the funds that helped fuel the loan market's surge after the tech and telecom bust of 2001. And there's $375 billion, the amount of bank debt used to fund leveraged buyouts completed between 2005 and 2007."