Quote from vhehn:
you could be right but consider this. as many problems as the us has it is nothing compared to the socialist countries of europe. the us$ will probably continue to be the most desirable currency in the world because there is no other good choice.
While not a sole US problem, it also has a HUGE trade deficit and while the dollar will obviously not plumit to hell it does have room to go alot lower than what it is. The whole reason John Snow has been touring Asia is trying to get China, Japan etc to let their currencies get stronger vs the USD and promote a general USD weakness to help exports from the US.
Read about oil and the USD dollar too with regards to the Euro.
"Oil dollars: The key to the oil dollar motivation is the fiat currency for trading oil. Under an OPEC agreement, all oil has been traded in US dollars since 1971 which makes the US dollar the de facto major international trading currency. Nations actually need a common currency for trade. With the trade so badly balanced, the majority of the money flow is one way. If other nations have to hold US dollars to buy oil, then they find it is convenient and necessary for them to do other trading in those dollars. This fact gives the United States a huge trading advantage and helps make it the dominant economy in the world.
As an economic bloc, the European Union is the only challenger to the USA's economic position, and it created the euro to challenge the dollar in international markets. However, the EU is not yet united behind the euro - there is a lot of jingoistic national politics involved, not least in Britain - and in any case, so long as nations throughout the world must hoard dollars to buy oil, the euro can make only limited inroads into the dollar's dominance.
Iraq's switch to the euro has got Iran thinking about switching too; Venezuela, the fourth largest oil producer, began looking at it and was cutting out the dollar by bartering oil with several nations including America's bete noir, Cuba. Russia is seeking to ramp up oil production with Europe (trading in euros) an obvious market."
America gets up huge debts, but other countries have to buy USD to buy oil, a license to print money. Obviously Iraq will no longer be trading in Euros now. If UK joins the Euro however that will be Brent crude produced in a Euro nation and will give other nations an incentive. While the USD is obviously still the "worlds currency" to an extent, It would be foolish to discount the Euro when it encompases so many varying countries and is on the border of so many more. Imagine what would happen to the USD value if countries started dropping vast amounts of dollars so they can also use Euros to buy oil. Americas debt problems would suddenly get a whole lot worse.