Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Levitt

Levitt is selling a faith that regulators rarely admit to in public: the best government is the kind that takes credit for markets without taking responsibility for them. The line is built on a neat contrast - not "government fiat", but the supposedly organic hustle of "competing interests" and investor demand, turbocharged by "advancing technology". It's market mythology with a regulator's imprimatur, and that's what gives it power. Coming from a public servant, the statement works as a strategic self-effacement: he positions government as the backdrop, not the author, of "great successes."

The subtext is a defense against two perennial accusations aimed at market overseers: that regulation strangles innovation, or that officials pick winners. By framing success as the product of competition meeting investor needs, Levitt signals allegiance to market discipline while preserving a role for the SEC as referee, not engineer. "Promises posed by advancing technology" is doing double duty: it flatters the inevitability narrative (progress will happen; don't get in its way) while quietly warning that those "promises" are what markets sell - and what regulators must police when hype turns into fraud.

Context matters: Levitt's tenure as SEC chair in the 1990s sat inside a deregulatory zeitgeist and a tech-fueled boom where capital markets were treated as democracy's purest instrument. The sentence reads like an attempt to reconcile enforcement with optimism: celebrate innovation, nod to investors, and keep government from sounding like the protagonist.