The size of the bankruptcy trails only those of Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Enron in U.S. history. CIT hopes to reduce its debt by $10 billion through the reorganization that will shift ownership to its bondholders and creditors.

"The decision to proceed with our plan of reorganization will allow CIT to continue to provide funding to our small-business and middle-market customers, two sectors that remain vitally important to the U.S. economy," CEO Jeffrey Peek said in a statement.

The company said its operating subsidiaries, including CIT Bank, weren't part of the filing and are expected to continue operating.

That’s good news, said Emmanuel Weintraub of Emanuel Weintraub Associates. “The lending arm of CIT is not in the bankruptcy package—business as usual, nothing has changed,” he said. “That clears up a lot of uncertainty. I’m sure that some of our clients who thought that maybe they would jump may not jump now.”

And that’s a relief to the system, given the thousands of companies that do business with CIT. “If everybody jumps, there’s not the capacity,” Weintraub said.

CIT’s experience may lead to closer looks at the books of businesses that want to borrow from the institution in the future, he added.

“The rules haven’t changed. You can’t run a sloppy business. You have to show that you can support your obligations, which is to pay back on time with interest,” Weintraub said. “It puts a greater burden on business management to…generate increasing profit streams.”

Had CIT stuck to its core business, it probably wouldn’t have run into the trouble that led it into bankruptcy, Dunkelberg said. CIT is widely acknowledged as an expert at financing small business, Weintraub added. But like many others in the financial world, CIT gambled in the subprime-mortgage and other risky financial markets.

“They should have stuck to their knitting,” Dunkelberg said.