Probably once a week someone asks me about the value of the US dollar and when I either explain it is not doing well or just laugh, they start to tell me how I am wrong. How the dollar is doing fine or the dollar is recovering or whatever. My guess is that many people who enter into this discussion have trouble listening and/or reading so I decided to try to explain this with pictures.

Well, I have now reduced the answer to but one picture. I created it by entering some parameters at http://www.oanda.com/currency/historical-rates/ and capturing the result. First, here is the picture.

Now, a few words. I will try to keep it simple.

• It starts on 1 January 2002 and ends as of the beginning of August 2011.
• The base is the US dollar. Everyone starts even as of 1 January 2002.
• The graph shows the percentage change relative to the Euro as we move forward in time.
• The other currencies are the Euro, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Brazilian Real and gold.
• Anywhere along the way where some line is about the 0.00% line, it is doing worse than the US dollar.
• Finally, note that as of now there are no lines above the 0.00% line.

Note that on the site you can move the cursor along and the percentage numbers get updated. You can also select other currencies to put in the chart if the one ones I picked don't make you feel very good.