From The Financial Times

Some industry analysts estimate, for example, that if investment banks were to cut leverage ratios from 30 times (or recent levels) to 20 times, this would trigger $6,000bn worth of asset sales, excluding likely deleveraging by hedge funds too.

Of course, such deleveraging will not happen overnight, or necessarily in such a simplistic way. But what these rough calculations show, as George Magnus at UBS points out, is that the putative $700bn RTC fund cannot be considered an all-encompassing solution to the current woes. Deleveraging, in other words, still has a long way to run – at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for starters.