The 500-year reign of the bankers has come to an end. Who has replaced them? Multinational corporations, especially those that possess data, writes Alan Kohler.

In the third episode of the Wolf Hall TV series, Thomas Cromwell tells Harry Percy, the cocky former suitor of Anne Boleyn, the facts of life:

"How can I explain this to you? The world is not run from where you think it is. From border fortresses. Even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from Lisbon. From wherever the merchant ships set sail off into the west. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses. From the pens that scrape out your promissory notes."

"So believe me when I say that my banker friends and I will rip your life apart."

Needless to say, it was quite a revelation to poor Percy and would have marked the very early days of the rise of bankers.

Five hundred years later, it's not so clear anymore who runs the world.

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It isn't bankers, even though they are called "too big to jail", having paid $235 billion of other peoples' money in fines, much of it for crimes no less, but no jail time.

In his recent letter to JPMorgan Chase shareholders, chief executive Jamie Dimon relates that 8000 people have been hired to deal with "compliance".

More than 950 people are dealing with 21 separate regulators on 750 different capital requirements. These employees have produced 20,000 pages of documentation and 225 new econometric models.

There are 1000 people devoting a million work hours annually to the task of recovery and resolution, 400+ staff working on 500+ liquidity requirements; 800,000 compliance training hours; 1000+ people working across 43 business groups on 1000+ data reporting requirements and 3300+ pages of principles and guidelines; 700+ staff poring over 3150 pages of derivatives guidelines, including 237 final articles; and 300+ people working 1000 pages of the Volcker Rule.

The power of the counting houses is being mown down, and the bankers tied like Gulliver by the regulatory Lilliputians.

A side effect is that they are being regulated out of market making and trading, with the result that the bond markets are more volatile because banks can no longer arbitrage out price spikes, and more dangerous because real buyers must be found instead of placing stock in bank warehouses.

So maybe it's central bankers who run the world. After all, they control the price and the volume of money and banks are their puppets.

In fact, investors have given up watching the economic playing arena and have instead turned to watch the screen of central bank "guidance" - a sort of proxy reality in which money is materialised from thin air and interest rates are de-materialised to zero, and central bankers play with the markets via semantics.

The world of finance has become addicted to policy.

As Jim Grant, publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, wrote recently:

The mispricing of biotech stocks or corn and soybeans is of no great consequence to finance at large. Interest rates are another matter. Universal prices, they discount future cash flows, calibrate risk and define investment hurdle rates. Interest rates are the traffic signals of a market economy.

You would think that those who control the traffic lights control the traffic, except that the US Fed funds rate has been next to zero for six years now. And, while the stock market has tripled, economic growth is stuck at 2 per cent.

Fed chair Janet Yellen confessed last week that things have not gone according to plan.

"There has been some softness in the economic data," she complained. "The pace of improvement is highly uncertain." Things could go either way, she concluded.

These are hardly the words of the ruler of the world.

Her European counterpart, Mario Draghi, last week celebrated economic growth of 1.4 per cent annualised, having also cut interest rates to zero and started printing money. In Europe the lords of money are just satisfied with having, so far, averted catastrophe, but that remains a work in progress.

In Australia, Glenn Stevens has repeatedly bemoaned the limitations of monetary policy. His deputy, Phil Lowe, was at it again last week.

The reason for the impotence of central banks is the collapse of the money multiplier. The Fed's balance sheet has ballooned, and the US monetary base (bank reserves plus currency) has increased 378 per cent since 2008. But broadly defined, money supply, M2, has increased just 53 per cent.

The money is printed, but it goes nowhere that matters. As Jim Grant puts it: "Central banks may propose, but the market disposes. They have created a bull market but not inflation; wealth but not growth."

So the 500-year reign of the bankers has come to an end. Who has replaced them?

Not sovereigns and politicians. We were reminded of that last week when an inquiry into the alleged manipulation of Australia's most important price - iron ore - was cancelled at the behest of those to be inquired into.

Modern power resides in multinational corporations, especially those that possess data.

In Cromwell's day, data was scratched on parchment with a quill and ink. Now it's stored by the zettabyte in the cloud. Data is the new money and vice versa. (Money is nothing but data.)

Trade agreements between nations are no longer about the movement of goods and services, but the enforcement of the intellectual property and copyright of multinationals. The Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions that now exist in 3000 so-called trade deals are nothing other than states yielding their sovereignty to corporations.

In part, their power comes from their mobility, combined with their roles as tax collectors and employers. Jobs and taxes are the currency of politics.

But most of all it comes from the dossiers they are building on everybody.

The phrase "knowledge itself is power" was first written by Sir Francis Bacon about 50 years after the death of Henry VIII. Ralph Waldo Emerson took it a step further with: "There is no knowledge that is not power."

Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are the new age's knowledge utilities, collecting and harvesting its power.

Alan Kohler is a finance presenter on ABC News. He tweets at @alankohler.