Network analyses of financial markets often tend to come up with the same result. Whether they look at interbank lending, deposits, credit insurance or derivatives exposures, the pattern is a ‘core-periphery’ network, with a core of a few institutions (often the largest) all strongly connected to each other, and a periphery of (generally smaller) institutions with weak connections to a few members of the core.

But new research published in the Journal of Network Theory in Finance suggests the