Politics & Power Quote by Michael Oxley

Acute is doing a lot of quiet work here. Oxley’s line is less a warning about terrorism than a justification for a particular kind of statecraft: the government as insurer of last resort for risks so catastrophic that markets either misprice them or refuse to touch them. It’s the language of crisis, but also the language of continuity. By framing terrorism as an ongoing condition rather than a discrete threat, he normalizes exceptional intervention as a permanent feature of the economy.

The phrase “private market cannot continue” flips a familiar ideological script. In conservative rhetoric, markets usually deliver and government distorts; here, the market is portrayed as fragile, even dependent. That’s not a philosophical pivot so much as a pragmatic one: when the potential losses are unbounded, insurers retreat, credit tightens, construction stalls, and the ripple effects hit constituents fast. “Backstop” is the key euphemism, a technical term that softens what’s really being proposed: taxpayer exposure to private-sector risk.

Context matters. Oxley was a central figure in early-2000s financial and regulatory debates, when policymakers were trying to keep capital flowing in a post-9/11 landscape. This is the political art of making a bailout sound like infrastructure. The subtext is a bargain: we’ll preserve normal commerce by socializing the tail risk. The intent isn’t just to manage terror; it’s to keep the economic machine from treating terror as uninsurable reality.