This is a money word, mostly British, from the world of companies and banks. Gearing is the relationship between what a company is worth and what it owes. If it has borrowed a lot, compared with its own value, people say it has high gearing. Low gearing means it has not borrowed much. The picture is the gears in a machine: borrow a lot, and both your gains and your losses can be “geared up” — they get bigger than they would have been with only your own money. In American English the close word is leverage. On the news you will hear “highly geared” for a company deep in debt. It is cold and formal; you would not use it about a family credit card, though actually people do stretch it a little to a person or a country living on a lot of borrowed money. High gearing is not a compliment. It can mean bigger chance of profit, and bigger chance of trouble.