Terms for leveraged loans, often sought by private equity investors, are becoming more like those available in the middle stages of the boom in 2004, a couple of practitioners told the Banking and Finance Conference in Melbourne yesterday.Jonathan Kelly, director of CHAMP Ventures, told one forum at the conference that it was a return to "2003-, 2004-style term sheets".Kelly did not accept a suggestion that leveraged loan availability was "easy", and highlighted differences in pricing, with up front fees in the order of four per cent and spreads over pricing benchmarks in excess of 300 basis points.Comparative data on leveraged finance terms presented to the conference show that, based on global comparisons and on transactions in 2010, banks are willing to lend between five and six times EBITDA to fund leveraged acquisitions.This multiple is similar to, or better than, the norms in 2004 and 2005; but is not as aggressive as the multiples of between six and ten times EBITDA before the credit crunch kicked in three years ago.The interest rate paid on leveraged finance is in fact lower than during the boom, since very low base rates (almost everywhere bar Australia) more than compensate for the much higher spreads that borrowers pay.