In the years leading up to the financial crisis that began in 2007, the core of the financial system was vulnerable to major shocks emanating from any of a variety of sources. While this particular crisis was triggered by over-levered home owners and a severe downturn in U.S. housing markets (Mian and Sufi, 2015), a reasonably well supervised financial system would have been much more resilient to this and other types of severe shocks.