Over the past decade or so, systemic risk has been increased by vastly increasing network complexities resulting from greater interconnectivity between institutions as well as countries. Therefore statement I is incorrect.

Statement II is incorrect and statement III is correct because the average path length between institutions, or their degree of separation where they are not directly dealing with each other but through other counterparties to which they are exposed (analogous to 6 degrees of separation, or the 'small world' property), has shrunk and not increased.

Statement IV correctly describes knife edge dynamics, which is another way of waying that the financial network displays a tipping point property.