This is a "multiplicative" process. Each incident multiplies into more. The following is an analogy to get an intuitive idea of the underlying math/dynamics.

Imagine someone gets into a car wreck. That's bad. Maybe they survive, maybe they don't. That's a non-multiplicative incident. Car wrecks almost always are.

Now imagine if a car wreck spawns 3 other car wrecks. That's even worse. Some survive, some don't. And each of those 3 car wrecks spawn 3 of their own car wrecks. So after just two iterations, we know have 9 car wrecks. And after 4 iterations, we have 82 car wrecks. And after 10 iterations, we have 60,000 car wrecks.

How do we manage something like this?

There's only one answer: prevent every single car wreck possible. Pull out all the stops.

Even if you prevent a hundred car wrecks, just letting one extra car wreck happen could set off a chain reaction of 60,000 more car wrecks.

There's no such thing as over-reaction when dealing with something like this.

There's no balancing this with that.

There's only pulling out all the stops.

I've never met anyone who had an intuitive grasp of exponentials. Which is why the numbers after a few iterations of compounding are always surprising. And that's why I'm posting this.

And yes, this is an oversimplification. Please do not nitpick. This is simply a thought experiment to show what systemic risk means. Some dangers are linear in behavior. Others, like infectious diseases, are often exponential.