Politics & Power Quote by Franklin Raines

The seduction here is how confidently it swaps a market claim for a law of nature. Raines isn’t merely forecasting; he’s manufacturing certainty. “Only going to go up” is absolutist language dressed as common sense, then backed with a thin veneer of empiricism: “since we’ve been keeping track.” That clause is doing the heavy lifting. It turns a limited dataset into destiny, implying that because something hasn’t happened within recorded memory, it can’t happen at all.

The subtext is salesmanship with institutional authority. As a high-profile housing finance executive in the early-2000s boom, Raines is speaking to borrowers, investors, and policymakers at once, smoothing over anxiety about leverage, lax lending, and ballooning risk. The line reassures ordinary homeowners that they’re not speculating; they’re participating in the inevitable. It reassures capital markets that the collateral is self-correcting. It reassures regulators that the system’s “fundamentals” are sturdy enough to justify growth without friction.

What makes it work rhetorically is its quiet pivot from history to guarantee. “Nationwide” narrows the frame to avoid local downturns; “never” erases cycles; “keeping track” flatters the listener with a sense of modern, data-driven rigor while sidestepping the possibility that modern tracking coincides with an unusually stable, postwar period. In hindsight, it reads like a capsule of pre-crash American optimism: the belief that scale, statistics, and sophisticated finance had finally domesticated risk.