Remarks at the IAA Investment Adviser Compliance Conference | NFT⚡️TECH
Remarks at the IAA Investment Adviser Compliance Conference
William Birdthistle
Director, Division of Investment Management
March 3, 2022
Good morning. Thank you, Karen, for your kind introduction and for inviting me to speak today. I am delighted to join you for my first public address as the Director of the Division of Investment Management.
Let me begin, if I may, by making clear that my remarks today are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission, the Commissioners, or the SEC staff.
Just over two months ago, I was both an academic and a student, studying the economic history of post-bellum America, a time when the country emerged from war to confront income inequality, concentrated wealth, and social and political upheaval, all while heading toward a global pandemic.
I’ve been tempted to wonder whether I can bring any of those learnings into my new job, but nothing dismayed my history professors more than anachronistic presentism and ahistorical comparisons among different eras. So I will leave the Gilded Age behind and focus instead on our own period of economic history: what Daniel Rogers calls the Age of Fracture2 and Jonathan Levy calls the Age of Chaos. “Fracture” and “chaos” certainly don’t sound like cheery adjectives, and those historians make some persuasive claims about the trials of our time.
But while I’m loath to contradict eminent scholars, I’m also mindful of another concept emphasized heavily in the study of history: contingency. What another historian, Joanne Freeman, defines as “the importance of remembering that people in the past were living in their present, unaware of future outcomes.”4 What we as participants in our economic life possess that historians don’t is an ability to change those future outcomes. The challenge for those of us living, advising, and regulating in a moment of profound innovation is finding ways to marry dynamism with integrity, and creativity with order.
Today, I would like to share thoughts about the tests posed by modern markets for the millions of Americans who face the task of navigating them.
