The definition used by Adrian and Shin (2010) is also close to the one that I am using but includes public financial institutions (specifically, GSEs and agency and GSE-backed  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  In the first quarter of this year, U.S. financial firms held credit market debt equal to $ trillion, or 2.2 times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States.
As the figure shows, the size of the financial sector relative to GDP grew for nearly 50 years but declined after the financial crisis and has only started increasing again this year. From the perspective of financial stability, there are two important dimensions along which the categories of institutions in figure 1 differ.