Our results suggest that nancial systems may exhibit a robust-yet-fragile tendency: while the probability of contagion may be low, the effects can be extremely widespread when problems occur. The model also highlights how seemingly indistinguishable shocks can have very different consequences for the nancial system depending on whether or not the shock hits at a particular pressure point in the network structure. This helps explain why the evidence of the resilience of the system to fairly large shocks prior to 2007 was not a reliable guide to its future robustness
