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Over time, there's a very close correlation between what happens to the dollar and what happens to the price of oil. When the dollar gets week, the price of oil, which, as you know, and other commodities are denominated in dollars, they go up. We saw it in the '70s, when the dollar was savagely weakened.

When the dollar collapses, it's not doing it in a vacuum. If the dollar loses value, it's doing so relative to some other currency. So the purchasing power that we lose, somebody else gets.

If you just analyze, historically, the chances of getting two quarters of more than a 5 percent gain in the dollar index, it has happened only two times since the '70s, so it's very rare.

As you know, low demand and high supply means a drop in value of anything, including the dollar.

The more competitive value of the dollar turned around the trade deficit.

The problem started before World War I. The gold standard was working fairly well. But it broke down because of the war and what happened in the 1920s. And then the U.S. started to become so dominant in the world, with the dollar becoming the central currency after the 1930s, the whole world economy shifted.

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

I remember being in the Ontario Legislature and the Liberals yelling over at me about the fact that the dollar was rising, and that was bad for business, and didn't I realize that. And I thought, 'What are you talking about?' The value of the currency in part, large part, reflects the world's view of the state of our economy.