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Keynes said of sound bankers that they were ruined in a conventional way along with their fellows so that no-one could be blamed (Keynes (1932)). If Keynes was right, then asset managers may be a different breed. Yet even if the “fail” element of too-big-to-fail is a red-herring, the “big” is not. Distress at an asset manager may aggravate frictions in financial markets, in particular frictions in market liquidity. One example would be an asset fire-sale. This might arise if assets from a failing fund were offloaded at a pace and scale that caused indigestion in the underlying market (Office of Financial Research (2013), Hau and Lai (2012)). If so, asset prices would be driven south, possibly to well below their long-term or fundamental value. Put differently, illiquidity risk premia in those markets could be driven to sub-optimally high levels. This fire-sale friction might be fanned by the actions of investors or counterparties. Falling asset prices may be the prompt for withdrawal (in the case of open-ended funds) or sales (in the case of closed-end funds). In some respects, this would mimic a banking “run”, albeit operating through non-conventional channels (Chen et al (2010)). This could itself induce a further round of asset fire sales in an amplifying loop. The good news here is that, unlike in banking, history is not littered with examples of failing funds wreaking havoc in financial markets. The historical examples we have tend to be confined to small and isolated corners of the financial system.