This new discipline is being administered by a completely new system of international finance. Unlike all prior arrangements, the new system was not built by politicians, economists, central bankers, or finance ministers. No high level international conference produced a master plan. The new system was built by technology. And just as Edison failed to foresee that his phonograph would have any commercial value, the men and women who tied the world together did not fully realize they were building an electronic infrastructure that would change the world. Yet the money traders understood immediately and drove their trades over the network.

The convergence of computers and telecommunications has created a new international monetary system, and even a new standard by which the value of currencies is determined. We sit at home and watch a live broadcast of riots in a country on the other side of the earth, and a currency falls, in minutes. We hear that a leadership crisis has been resolved and a currency rises.

For the first time in history, investors, merchants, and ordinary citizens can know almost instantly of breaking events all over the earth. And, depending on how they interpret these events, their desire to hold more or less of a given currency will be inescapably translated into a rise or fall of the exchange value.