Since the financial crisis, regulators have aimed to make the system safer by making some derivatives less risky. Their efforts on that front, however, may have undermined their work on another - tackling the threat of institutions that are too big to fail.

The clearing houses that process many over-the-counter derivatives contracts have become behemoths, processing much larger chunks of the $532tn market than they did before. That has generated concern from within the industry all the way to the White House. In October, former Goldman Sachs president and then chief economic adviser to the President, Gary Cohn, warned that clearing houses may represent a “new systemic problem”.