During the recent political campaign a great deal was heard about change, each candidate vying to become the most aggressive agent of change. What the candidates mostly ignored was that the ability to effect change without being instantly judged has largely been lost by governments, no matter who runs them. During the industrial age, governments accrued hitherto unprecedented powers. But the industrial age is fading into the information age, wherein governments are losing power, and there is no going back. In the future predicted by George Orwell, technology allowed Big Brother to watch you day and night. Today it is you and I who are watching Big Brother. This ability to focus world opinion quickly means that the ability of the sovereign to act alone, wlthout being checked by any outside force, is long gone.

As the Clinton Administration prepares to take office, it will find its freedom to act severely curtailed by a totally new international financial system. The new system exerts a harsh discipline on national economic policy. Unlike all prior arrangements, this system was not built by politicians, economists, central bankers or finance ministers. No summit conference produced a master plan. No new Keynes stepped forward with a fresh general theory of economics. The new system was built by technology.

It was not even built consciously. The men and women who tied the world together did not fully realize that they were building an electronic infrastructure that would restrict the power of governments. The convergence of computers and telecommunications linked together the currency traders of the world in real time and created a new monetary standard, the Information Standard. The market for currency trading has dispersed from a few trading rooms to over 200,000 computer screens in hundreds of trading rooms in dozens of countries, all tied together by the global nerwork. No one is in control, or rather everyone is. A political joke, a prime minister's statement or new inflation figures are transmitted instantly around the world.

This new speed of transmission changes the global market in kind and not just in degree. Speed is what changes a series of still pictures into a motion picture or makes a harmless lump of lead into a deadly bullet.

The global market makes and publishes judgments about each currency in the world every hour and every minute of the day. The forces are so powerful that government or central bank intervention can only result in expensive failure. Governments do not welcome the Information Standard anymore than absolute monarchs embraced universal suffrage.

Certainly François Mitterrand did not welcome the change. When he was elected president of France in 1981 he was a committed socialist. Almost immediately money began to flow out of France and within six months Mitterrand had to reverse course and become procapitalist.

Since 1981 the market has grown in size and power. Today almost $2 trillion changes hands in New York alone. Indeed, there is not enough money in the reserves of the central banks of the world to influence significantly exchange rates on anything but a momentary basis.

From a political point of view, it is even worse since there is no way to resign from the new Information Standard, as you could withdraw from the Gold Standard. On Mar. 6, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt issued a proclamation prohibiting Americans from owning gold. The final blow to the gold standard was administered on Aug. 5, 1971 by President Nixon, when he terminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold. Thus the U.S. resigned from the system in order to be free of its discipline.

President Clinton will not have this freedom to pursue an economic policy independent of the rest of the world. Technology has taken it away.

Our world can no longer be understood as a collection of national economies. The traditionally multinational economy in which "products" are exported has been replaced by a truly global one in which value is added in several different countries. The traditional business of import and export is being replaced by a transnational system of product development, design, production and marketing that takes less and less notice of national borders, and which national governments can disrupt only at the risk of economic chaos far greater than the protectionist disasters of the past.

In the knowledge age, intellectual capital is the dominant factor of production, and the most fundamentally important market is for intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is extremely mobile. It will go where it is wanted and stay where well treated. Nations that respect the freedom of intellectual capital and accommodate it will prosper. Those that do not will wither. Whatever policies the Clinton Administration chooses, it will not be able to get away from that sometimes inconvenient limit on its powers.