"Once again, stock markets have been threatened with extinction for almost 75 years, and I have found that stock markets are harder to kill than roaches"
About this Quote
Stock markets, Levitt implies, are America’s most overdiagnosed institution: declared dead in every downturn, then annoyingly alive the next morning. The roach comparison is doing double duty. It’s a jab at the melodrama of pundits and politicians who predict “the end of markets” whenever volatility spikes, and it’s a grudging compliment to a system engineered for survival. Roaches don’t thrive because they’re noble; they thrive because they adapt. Levitt is telling you to stop confusing discomfort with collapse.
Coming from a public servant who ran the SEC, the line also smuggles in a regulatory worldview. He’s not romanticizing Wall Street; he’s normalizing it. Extinction is the wrong frame. Markets don’t need eulogies, they need maintenance. The joke softens a harder claim: that reforms, scandals, crashes, and public outrage rarely touch the underlying incentive machine. You can punish individuals, rewrite rules, raise disclosure standards, and the market will still route around damage, find liquidity, re-price risk, and keep going.
The context is decades of cyclical panic: postwar recessions, Black Monday, the savings-and-loan wreckage, the dot-com delirium, the post-9/11 slump, and every “this time is different” prophecy in between. Levitt’s intent is to lower the temperature. His subtext is more bracing: don’t bet on moral reckonings to end capitalism’s core arena. If you want better outcomes, you plan for resilience, not apocalypse.
Coming from a public servant who ran the SEC, the line also smuggles in a regulatory worldview. He’s not romanticizing Wall Street; he’s normalizing it. Extinction is the wrong frame. Markets don’t need eulogies, they need maintenance. The joke softens a harder claim: that reforms, scandals, crashes, and public outrage rarely touch the underlying incentive machine. You can punish individuals, rewrite rules, raise disclosure standards, and the market will still route around damage, find liquidity, re-price risk, and keep going.
The context is decades of cyclical panic: postwar recessions, Black Monday, the savings-and-loan wreckage, the dot-com delirium, the post-9/11 slump, and every “this time is different” prophecy in between. Levitt’s intent is to lower the temperature. His subtext is more bracing: don’t bet on moral reckonings to end capitalism’s core arena. If you want better outcomes, you plan for resilience, not apocalypse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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