My Comment:  The world has written our epitaph, they have engraved our headstone, they have opened the grave.  They are just waiting for our last breath.  If obama has his way, it will be soon, the death rattle is sounding.  Hyperbole?  Is it?

(Text By:  The Telegraph)  All great empires – from the Greek, to the Roman, the Spanish and the British – have at their heart a dominant means of exchange which is very much part of their political and social hegemony. Once upon a time, it was Roman coinage which was the world’s pre-eminent currency. In more recent times it was the British pound. Today, it’s the US dollar to which international investors flock as a safe haven for their money. Highly liquid and apparently reliable – until recently at least – nothing else comes even remotely close to the greenback’s dominant position in the international monetary system.

That this position – what Giscard d’Estaing referred to as America’s “exorbitant privilege” – could so casually be put at risk by politicians on Capitol Hill is an extraordinary spectacle that may be indicative of a great power already seriously on the wane.

With the pound, the fall from grace was swift. Britain emerged from the devastation of the First World War an irreparably damaged economic and military power, with crushing debts and a deeply impaired manufacturing sector.

The dollar was able quickly to usurp the pound’s position. Final defeat for sterling came with Britain’s decision to leave the gold standard in 1931 – an economically sensible decision but a psychological turning point for sterling from which it never recovered.

Read the rest:  The sun is setting on dollar supremacy, and with it, American power – Telegraph

Photo Credit: By 57RRoberts (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Categories: news

Tags: fall of the dollar, Pound sterling, Roman currency, United States, World War I