Financial Markets and Martingales

This book was published in 1998 and translated to English in 2004. I just want to quote a paragraph here:

"As in the Gourd Game, they have a tendency to configure their risk in such a way that they will have some profit with probability close to 1 but a significant loss with a very small probability. This rare event, from hedge to hedge, can be reworked and spread over several assets, several periods, and several regions of the world so that it seems to have disappeared completely. The operator then thinks that he has realized an astute speculation in every case if the rare event produces a sufficiently large and exceptional perturbation of the markets so that his personal responsibility is out of question."

Obviously a lot of people know about this risk - but most of them, especially traders, tend to ignore it. Cash in first, let it blow up later and let the society bear the cost. Well...