The phrase "Too Big To Fail" may have provided filmmakers with an evocative movie title, but in the past decade it has rung hollow in financial and other markets around the world.
There was a time Too Big To Fail was almost an insurance policy for companies. Lehman Brothers, upon whom the 2011 movie is more than loosely based, is a good example in kind. No one, including most on Capitol Hill, imagined that a venerable institution in the US financial system could fail, or be allowed to fail.
Yet the events of 2008 which led to the demise of the bank - against the belief of Lehman's own chief executive - continued to dog various markets around the world.
In late 2011, the entire funding team at Norway's Eksportfinans, the country's semi-government export credit guarantee provider, had gone on a group screening of the movie "Too Big To Fail". Two weeks later Eksportfinans was suddenly shut without warning as Oslo decided to bring the operation fully in-house and froze new funding activities, sending investors into a spin.
But in 2016, is there a fear of another bank or corporate failure?
There have been several soothsayers remarking in the past two years of an impending US-led fresh financial crisis. Cynics might say this is a numbers game and that one day one of them will be credited with making the right call.
Some of them have suggested that the larger the bank, no greater the guarantee that it will be saved by the US Federal government or other banks. The consolidation of US banks post-crisis has been good for some that have grown huge, most notably JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM).
But while there are indeed warning signals and many market observers are unconvinced that the financial regulatory reforms following the 2008 crisis have been tight enough, there is reason to suppose that this time it might not be quite so bad.
So what is the evidence that all is not quite well in the financial markets today? Well, apart from a well-documented concern about drying liquidity in the US government bond market - the world's largest debt market - the new worries surround the repurchase agreement or "repo" market and yes, they are actually linked back to those government bond liquidity worries.
In the week ended March 9, the amount of deals where one party failed to deliver the government debt pledged as collateral jumped to $456bn. Sure, that was well off a peak of $2.6tn recorded late 2008 - but that was also in the eye of the financial crisis when nothing worked as it should, least of all did banks trust one another in the Interbank credit market.
Yet credit pundits believe that this time it is more a gyration than a spike, more an example of the new order post-crisis rather than a new crisis.
Why do the events in the repo market matter? Well, Wall Street institutions, hedge funds and real estate investment trusts rely on the $5tn repo market to finance their daily trades and any disruption is worrying because it could force them to cut holdings of bonds, stocks and other securities.
Some market observers speculated that failed trades could be a sign of cash problems of some institutions too exposed to the struggling energy sector. So far, however, there has been little evidence that the failures reflect any systemic woes.
It did remind some traders of 2008 when it happened on a grander scale. About one in 10 Treasury-backed repo trades failed in early March, compared with one in three during the crisis.
But what makes observers less inclined to panic this time around is not that statistic but rather that the jolts in failed trades are in fact a symptom of the greater regulation that banks must now abide by.
Regulation has exploded worldwide since 2008 and many believe that we are far from seeing a peak in regulation of financial markets.
The downside of investor protection can be that markets are less nimble and cost more money to operate. That in turn makes the rewards harder to generate and the expenses of staying on the trading floor higher. The result of this is - more banks are pulling out of trading and that in turn kills off liquidity necessary to avoid the trade failures.
Another factor cited for the events in March are the heavy selling by foreign central banks of older Treasuries boosted Wall Street's demand for cash as dealers needed more money than usual to buy the bonds. It is likely that one of those central banks was the People's Bank of China, which is now the largest foreign owner of T-Notes in the world and has had a domestic crisis to manage of its own.
In the repo market, older Treasuries are less desirable because they are less liquid, so lenders charge higher interest to those using them as a collateral.
That coincided with the government cutting back on longer-dated Treasury issues. The sales, excluding T-bills, fell to $192bn in March from $264bn a year ago.
Finally, it is important to note that failed trades in the repo market are a fact of life. They are back at a daily average of around $30bn.
The risks that are far harder to quantify but more likely to pose a dilemma for the Federal Reserve and financial institutions in the United States is what happens if the central bank moves too quickly to raise interest rates once China's economy returns to strong growth? A lot of households as well as corporates still have huge debt piles and that poses a new leveraging risk. It is only the banks themselves that have truly managed to repair their balance sheets since 2008.