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TROY — If you want to know where the economy and the stock market are going, Marshall Carter should know.

Carter, 69, is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and he spoke Wednesday at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute .

In both a private interview and in his talk at a packed theater at the school’s Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Carter was cautiously optimistic that the economy and the stock market will become steady again.

The finance industry in the United States has been in shambles since the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection nearly 12 months ago, shocking the world and helping push the economy into a deep recession.

We are not completely safe, and there is still potential for harm to our financial system and economy, Carter told an audience of well over 200 people, many of them RPI students and faculty.

At the depth of the financial crisis, the Dow Jones industrial average. a key index of the broader stock market, lost more than 40 percent of its value, although it has since recovered somewhat and is now down about 20 percent from last year.

In an interview before his speech, Carter said market volatility has many causes — including the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing market — but not a lack of confidence in the stock exchange.

It’s not a question of trust, Carter said. I don’t think we ever lost that trust. When you see people start to call their 401(k) a 201(k), the natural investor mindset is going to be a lot slower to come. None of the so-called scandals or crises hit the exchange.

Looking to the future, Carter says Main Street investors will want to see see less volatility in the markets. He says that volatility was caused by aggressive traders, not investors.

The country has finally figured out that there is a difference between need and want, Carter said. We should see some steady increases happen over the next five to six months.

A 1962 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Marine, Carter has worked most of his professional life in the financial sector. He worked for Chase Manhattan Bank for 15 years and later joined State Street Bank and Trust Co. in Boston, becoming chief executive officer in 1992. Carter has been a member of the NYSE board of directors since 2003 and was named chairman in 2005.

Although Carter said the last time he was on the RPI campus was 50 years ago playing for the West Point hockey team, his return was no coincidence. RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson is a fellow NYSE board member.

Like many, Carter is hoping that the stock markets don’t provide a September surprise as they have in the past, awakening from their summer slumber only to sink.

Boy, we sure hope not, Carter said. September had traditionally been a slow month. When Labor Day is late, you have less trading.

Larry Rulison can be reached at 454-5504 or by e-mail at lrulison@timesunion.com.