Science & Tech Quote by Arthur Levitt

Spoken like a regulator trying to make history sound like weather: inevitable, forceful, and beyond anyone's personal control. Arthur Levitt’s line bundles “competition, technology, and globalization” into a three-part engine of destiny, a neat rhetorical move that does two things at once. It flatters the industry’s self-image as innovative and forward-driven, while also framing disruption as something that simply “converged” - not something chosen, lobbied for, or unevenly borne.

The specific intent is managerial and legitimizing. Levitt isn’t praising finance for its own sake; he’s setting the stage for why old rules, old habits, and old guardrails can’t pretend it’s still the same market. “Transform the way business is done” is an alert to incumbents and a message to policymakers: if you regulate yesterday’s securities industry, you’ll get tomorrow’s crisis. The subtext, though, is that innovation is double-edged. In the 1990s and into the early 2000s, “technology” and “globalization” meant electronic trading, faster cross-border capital flows, and increasingly complex products - developments that created efficiency and liquidity, but also opacity, speed-driven fragility, and new angles for misconduct.

Context matters: Levitt’s SEC era was defined by the shift to digitized markets and heightened attention to investor protection (including accounting transparency), even as deregulatory energy and Wall Street exuberance pushed the narrative that innovation should move first and oversight should catch up later. The quote works because it sounds neutral while quietly arguing for urgency: adapt, or lose control of the market’s basic terms.