U.S. dollar

The euro cannot replace the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, and a system of two reserve currencies would be unstable, billionaire investor George Soros said on Thursday.

The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands.

Billionaire investor George Soros said the post-World War II era of easy credit backed by the U.S. dollar will end as the nation's economy slips into an ``almost inevitable'' recession.

MOSCOW — Russians increasingly favor euros over dollars when exchanging money or withdrawing foreign currency from bank accounts, the central bank said.

Easily missed amid the rising outcry over oil prices is the fact that they have only been skyrocketing in dollar terms. Priced in euros—or yen, or pounds sterling—the cost of a barrel of oil has risen much less over the past decade. At recent meetings of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, ministers disputed whether oil should be sold in euros instead of dollars (WashPost), in light of the dollar’s recent decline. Officials from Venezuela, Iran, and Algeria called for a switch. But Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, both of which hold huge dollar reserves, urged caution, and the bloc concluded the meetings saying it would further study (FT) the impact of the falling dollar on its member states.

THE GCC summit, which concluded in Doha yesterday, has not taken a decision to drop the dollar peg, but it is for each member state to take appropriate steps to safeguard their currencies, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister HE Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani has said. Talking to reporters after the conclusion of the two-day summit, HE Sheikh Hamad stressed that de-pegging from the dollar was a “sovereign decision” for each country to take.

A FINANCIAL crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to ,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said. "We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen," Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a "Panic of 2008." "The bigger they are, the harder they'll fall," he said in an interview with New York's Hudson Valley Business Journal.

The loonie is one of the currencies shouldering a disproportionate share of the U.S. greenback's decline, Tamim Bayoumi, head of the North American division of the International Monetary Fund's western hemisphere department, said on Tuesday. "The fall in the U.S. dollar is probably on net a good thing," said Mr. Bayoumi, echoing comments made by the IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the G20 meeting last weekend. "We've had a view for a long time the U.S. dollar is overvalued and that to lower global imbalances it needs to depreciate."

The U.S. dollar sank to record lows Tuesday as traders looked to Washington for new housing data. In morning European trading the euro bought $1.4787, up from $1.4667 late Monday in New York. The British pound rose to $2.0639 from $2.0497 in New York, while the dollar rose to purchase 110.20 Japanese yen from 109.85. The euro and the pound have been climbing steadily against the dollar since August amid fears for the health of the U.S. economy, stoked by the subprime credit crisis. The euro hit its previous all-time high of $1.4752 on Nov. 9.