Success Quote by Christina Romer

There is a quiet provocation in Romer calling bubble-free growth not a fantasy but a baseline expectation. The line is doing reputational repair for the post-2008 policy class: it takes what many investors treat as a law of nature - booms inevitably curdle into mania - and reframes it as a governance problem. That shift matters. If bubbles are inevitable, regulators are spectators with clipboards; if bubbles are preventable, they are culpable when they look away.

The phrasing is carefully technocratic, but the intent is moral. "Sound regulatory framework" sounds like plumbing, yet it smuggles in a theory of power: markets are brilliant at allocating resources until incentives, leverage, and opacity turn brilliance into a feedback loop. "Policymakers remain vigilant" is the softest way to describe the hard part - vigilance means intervening when everyone is getting rich and complaining that you're ruining the party. It also implies institutional memory: the tendency of regulators to fight the last war, loosen standards as calm persists, and discover too late that stability was the incubator.

Contextually, this is a response to the fatalism that took hold after repeated cycles, from the 1920s to the housing bubble: the idea that exuberance is just human nature expressing itself through finance. Romer pushes back with a conditional optimism: better rules, better oversight, better expectations. The subtext is that bubbles are not weather. They're policy outcomes.