Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Levitt

“Over the past two decades, we have clearly seen an erosion of ethical values” is the kind of sentence a regulator uses when the facts are damning but the politics are delicate. Arthur Levitt, best known as a hard-charging SEC chair, doesn’t name villains here because the point isn’t a single scandal; it’s a climate report. “Erosion” is doing heavy work: it frames misconduct not as a freak event but as a slow, normalized slide, the moral equivalent of coastal decay. That metaphor also quietly spreads responsibility. No one person causes erosion; it happens when enough small choices pile up and nobody builds a seawall.

The phrase “clearly seen” is classic public-service rhetoric: an appeal to shared observation that preempts partisan dispute. He’s telling you this isn’t ideology, it’s evidence - a record of restatements, conflicts, cozy auditors, and executive incentives that reward short-term performance over long-term credibility. Yet he avoids the moral panic of “collapse” or “corruption,” signaling he still believes institutions can be repaired. The sentence is admonition with an exit ramp.

Context matters: Levitt’s era sat on the fault line between 1980s deregulation and the late-90s boom culture, when finance became both a national religion and a competitive sport. The subtext is a warning about what happens when markets treat trust as a renewable resource. Accounting, disclosure, fiduciary duty - these are supposed to be boring. Levitt’s line argues that boredom is the point. When ethics stops being the quiet default and turns into a negotiable add-on, the system doesn’t just get uglier; it gets fragile.