Credit losses would therefore be less likely to produce banking system failure. However, that is not
what happened. When the crisis struck, and as figures from the IMF Global Financial Stability
Report of April 2008 made clear, the majority of the holdings of securitised credit, and the vast
majority of the losses which arose, did not lie in the books of end investors intending to hold
the assets to maturity, but on the books of highly leveraged banks and bank-like institutions.