Hedge fund
However, these claims are widely disputed by the financial industry, who typically regard hedge funds as "small enough to fail", since most are relatively small in terms of the assets they manage and operate with low leverage, thereby limiting the potential harm to the economic system should one of them fail. Formal analysis of hedge fund leverage before and during the financial crisis of 2007–2008 suggests that hedge fund leverage is both fairly modest and counter-cyclical to the market leverage of investment banks and the larger financial sector. Hedge fund leverage decreased prior to the financial crisis, even while the leverage of other financial intermediaries continued to increase. Hedge funds fail regularly, and numerous hedge funds failed during the financial crisis. In testimony to the US House Financial Services Committee in 2009, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman said he "would not think that any hedge fund or private-equity fund would become a systemically critical firm individually".