Top models and pop icons are asking to be paid in euros. New York’s Fifth Avenue is full of Europeans snapping up cheap goods. At Buffalo there are six-hour queues of cars full of Canadian consumers on weekend shopping trips to the US, and analysts predict that the UAE or Qatar will sever their dollar peg within the year. The bottom, it seems, has fallen out of the dollar, and with US firms across all sectors suffering from a looming recession, to quote one head of an international bank it’s "10% discount sale today on all American companies".
Interestingly, there is a growing conspiracy theory that the decline of the US dollar is perhaps not as unexpected as some would believe. This view has it that the powers that be in the US are pushing for a common currency for the US, Mexico and Canada, the so-called amero, a move that could only gain backing if the dollar were regarded as being in free fall against the euro, and US citizens became riled about the increasing costs of imported goods. The claim is that such a currency would enable the US to hold on to its control of the world stage in the face of strengthening Asian economies.