A measure of their desperation was the price that they were willing to pay to borrow in euro, sterling, yen, Swiss francs and Australian dollars, and then to swap those loans into dollars. Normally, since these were close to risk-free transactions, the premium was zero. As dollar funding shut down, it soared to 2–3 percent. Applied to balance sheets running into the trillions of dollars, that spread was enough to threaten an avalanche.
