Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Levitt

“It is incumbent on us” is classic regulator grammar: a moral drumbeat wrapped in a procedural suit. Arthur Levitt, speaking as SEC chair in an era when markets were being rewired by technology, consolidation, and new trading venues, uses obligation language to preempt the industry’s favorite argument: that change is “inevitable,” therefore beyond supervision. Incumbent makes oversight sound less like a choice and more like a civic duty.

The phrase “facilitate the development” is the real tell. Levitt isn’t promising a crackdown; he’s positioning the SEC as a traffic engineer, not a traffic cop. That’s strategic. In the 1990s, the SEC was under pressure to modernize without being accused of stifling innovation. Facilitate signals partnership with market evolution, while still claiming the right to design the lanes.

Then comes the soft power move: “a market structure that best assures.” Assures what, exactly? Not higher returns, not cheaper trading, not fairness in the moral sense. Benefits. And crucially, “the U.S. securities markets as a whole.” That “as a whole” is a rebuke to rent-seeking. It’s aimed at exchanges, broker-dealers, and emerging electronic platforms angling for rules that tilt profits their way. Levitt’s subtext is that fragmentation and speed can enrich intermediaries while degrading price discovery, transparency, and investor trust.

Rhetorically, the sentence is a balancing act: acknowledging disruptive change while insisting that legitimacy in finance is engineered, not discovered. The public interest isn’t an outcome markets naturally deliver; it’s something regulators have to design into the plumbing.