The lowering of legal and regulatory barriers across financial services and geography, the development of derivative markets, and the securitization of so much credit has enabled intermediaries to diversify and manage risk better, reduced the number of specialized lenders who would be vulnerable to sector- or area-specific shocks, and left borrowers far less dependent on particular lenders and consequently the economy much less vulnerable to problems at individual or even classes of institutions.
In the past few years, the financial markets have come through an extraordinarily stressful period, but one that was not marked by the sort of financial-sector distress that accompanied and intensified the economic problems in many previous such episodes.