Wall Street’s biggest firms are considering the suitability of selling opaque financial products to governments, endowments and not-for-profit institutions after the contracts magnified credit-market losses that plunged the U.S. into a recession.

“There is no distinction among very different groups of investors, and this is where things might change,” said Dino Kos, a managing director at Portales Partners LLC in New York and former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s open market operations.