Recent news article:
The US dollar is falling sharply against currencies around the world. Since March it has lost 9 per cent of its value against the yen, 17 per cent against the Canadian loonie, 18 per cent against the euro and 40 per cent against the Australian dollar.
And the price of gold rose to an all-time high of $1040 an ounce in the past week, partly on fears over the future of the greenback as a store of value.
The divergence between Obama's Nobel honour and the marketplace repricing of his country's future would appear to be a stark lesson in the difference between hope and reality. Hope for Obama's plans may soar, but his ability to meet those hopes is shrivelling with the value of the currency.
But serious people are troubled. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said last week that "the US would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency".
And even a political sympathiser of Obama's has warned that America could be about to suffer "a punishing dollar crisis".
A former US deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, Roger Altman, wrote at the weekend that while the US recession may be a problem today, it pales into insignificance next to the danger of America's vast government debt.
The "dismal deficit outlook poses a huge longer-term threat", he wrote in the Financial Times. "Indeed, it is just a matter of time before global financial markets reject this fiscal trajectory."
And that, of course, implies a savage sell-off of the US dollar. And the consequences "could jeopardise the entire recovery" of the American economy.
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