Since March, the dollar has lost about 15% of its value against the world’s other major currencies. That’s a dull way to put it, though, so you’re more likely to read or hear that the greenback is “wobbling,” “slumping,” “plunging” or even “collapsing.” Marc Faber, a Hong Kong–based investment guru with a flair for the dramatic, went so far as to declare in a TV interview a few weeks ago that the U.S. currency was on its way “to a value of exactly zero.”

Those are strong words for what, going strictly by the numbers, has been nothing more than a retracing of the dollar rally that followed last fall’s financial panic. When investors around the world got scared late last year, they poured money into U.S. Treasury securities that they perceived to be safe. That drove up the dollar. Then, after a few months, investors began taking risks again, putting money back into the U.S. stock market and into all sorts of investments in the rest of the world. So the dollar fell.

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