Economic Definition of leveraged buyout. Defined.
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Term leveraged buyout Definition: A method of corporate takeover or merger popularized in the 1980s in which the controlling interest in a company's corporate stock was purchased using a substantial fraction of borrowed funds. These takeovers were, as the financial-types say, heavily leveraged. The person or company doing the "taking over" used very little of their own money and borrowed the rest, often by issuing extremely risky, but high interest, "junk" bonds. These bonds were high-risk, and thus paid a high interest rate, because little or nothing backed them up.
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