Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Levitt

“Promoting the interaction of orders” is bureaucratic phrasing with a very sharp edge: it’s a proxy war over who gets to see, touch, and profit from the nation’s trades. Arthur Levitt, as SEC chair in the 1990s, was speaking from the fault line between a newly electronic market and an older, clubbier ecosystem of exchanges and dealer networks. “Orders” aren’t abstract; they’re people’s buy-and-sell intentions, and whoever controls their routing controls liquidity, pricing, and the quiet tolls extracted along the way.

The specific intent is reformist but cautious. Levitt isn’t declaring a revolution; he’s framing a technocratic imperative. “Interaction” reads like a neutral engineering goal, yet the subtext is moral and political: fragmented markets create informational ghettos where one venue’s best price can be invisible to another’s customer. That invisibility is profitable for intermediaries, costly for investors, and corrosive to the idea that a “national market system” is actually national.

The sentence’s power comes from its double bind. It admits the problem is “most difficult” because the obstacles aren’t merely technical. They’re institutional incentives, entrenched fee models, and the perennial temptation to design markets that look competitive while remaining selectively opaque. Calling it “crucially important” is Levitt’s way of invoking the SEC’s core legitimacy: markets are only “fair” if orders can genuinely meet, not just orbit each other behind proprietary walls.