  The recent financial crisis have generated renewed interests in fragilities
of global financial networks among economists and regulatory authorities. In
particular, a potential vulnerability of the financial networks is the
"financial contagion" process in which insolvencies of individual entities
propagate through the "web of dependencies" to affect the entire system. In
this paper, we formalize an extension of a financial network model originally
proposed by Nier et al. for scenarios such as the OTC derivatives market,
define a suitable global stability measure for this model, and perform a
comprehensive empirical evaluation of this stability measure over more than
700,000 combinations of networks types and parameter combinations. Based on our
evaluations, we discover many interesting implications of our evaluations of
this stability measure, and derive topological properties and parameters
combinations that may be used to flag the network as a possible fragile
network. An interactive software FIN-STAB for computing the stability is
available from the website www2.cs.uic.edu/~dasgupta/financial-simulator-files
