A little leverage

This is an excerpt from Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek article -- "There Is a Silver Lining":

"Leverage" is the fancy Wall Street word for debt. It's at the heart of the current crisis. Warren Buffet explained the problem in his inimitable way on "The Charlie Rose Show." "Leverage," he said, "is the only way a smart guy can go broke...You do smart things, you eventually get rich. If you do smart things and use leverage and you do one wrong thing along the way, it could wipe you out because anything times zero is zero. But it's reinforcing when the people around you are doing it successfully, you're doing it successfully, and it's a lot like Cinderella at the ball. The guys look better all the time, the music sounds better, it's more and more fun, you think, 'Why the hell should I leave at a quarter to 12? I'll leave at two minutes to 12.' But the trouble is, there are no clocks on the wall. And everybody thinks they're going to leave at two minutes to 12."

That makes sense. Maybe if they used fairy tale analogies more often I'd understand economics a little better.