The natural first response to this claim is, it has ever been so. The pressure of events has always been a major factor in determining the value of currencies. But the speed and volume of this new global market makes it something different in kind and not just in degree. Cherished political, regulatory, and economic levers routinely used by sovereigns in the past are losing some of their power because the new information standard is not subject to effective political tinkering. It used to be that political and economic follies played to a local audience and their results could be in part contained. A relatively small club of central bankers and politicians representing their sovereign governments believed it could control the value of a given currency. This is no longer true; the global market makes and publishes judgments about each currency in the world every minute and every hour of the day. The forces are so powerful that government intervention can only result in expensive failure over time.

When the volume of trading in anything is small, prices can be influenced dramatically by placing relatively large buy or sell orders. As the size of a market grows, the amount of orders that have to be placed to move the price either up or down becomes correspondingly larger. In the relatively small postwar money markets, central banks had enough resources to place orders large enough to influence the price of a currency. Today, with almost $2 trillion changing hands in New York alone, there is not enough money in the reserves of the world's central banks to significantly influence exchange rates on more than a momentary basis.

Technology has made us a global community in the literal sense of the word. Capital will go where it is wanted and stay where it is well treated. It will flee from manipulation or onerous regulation of its value or use, and no sovereign power can restrain it for long.

Governments do not welcome this information standard any more than absolute monarchs embraced universal suffrage. Politicians who wish to evade responsibility for imprudent fiscal and monetary policies correctly perceive that the information standard will punish them. Moreover, in contrast to former international monetary systems, there is no way for a sovereign to resign from the information standard. No matter what political leaders do or say, the screens will continue to light up, traders will trade, and currency values will continue to be set not by sovereign governments but by global plebiscite on the soundness of their fiscal and monetary policies.