Insurance companies, especially those in reinsurance, pension funds, and hedge funds continue to be willing, at a price, to supply this credit protection, despite the significant losses on such products that some of these investors experienced during the past three years.
These increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed, especially over the recent stressful period, to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than existed just a quarter-century ago. One prominent example was the response of financial markets to a burgeoning and then deflating telecommunications sector.