Daniel, don't miss the significance of these pronouncements by foreign holders of dollars. There is more at work here than a merely intellectual interest in a multi-national currency.

The timing is important, too. It's coming up because those foreign holders of dollars and dollar-denominated securities are afraid.

What do they fear? They fear the dollar may weaken. A lot.

Why? Because they have looked at the economic crisis, whose epicenter is Wall Street. They have looked at Geithner's bailout plan. And they have looked at what the Fed is doing.

What they see is the US Government taking on unprecedented levels of debt very rapidly. They see the Fed gushing the money supply just as fast as they can gush it, and bringing toxic assets into their own reserves, which will probably force them at some point to increase the money supply even further to cover their obligations, since their toxic assets won't. What they see is a nation whose industrial output is negligible, and so is its ability to redeem foreign-held dollars for goods or services. Add that all up, and you get, not the possibility of a currency crash, but the likelihood of one.

The loss of our industrial output - we "offshored" it - is not new.

For a long while we replaced industrial exports with financial services. Now we are in a unique position of being a nation with financial services for sale, but nobody in their right mind would buy them. Our financial sector is poisoned with fraud so extensive, it beggars description.

Are we prosecuting the fraudsters and clearing them out of our financial house? No, we're keeping them in business and rewarding them with taxpayer money. We're propping them up with "facilities" from the Fed which also put the taxpayer on the hook. Debt piled on debt to keep fraudsters going - fraudsters whose assets nobody can trust any more.

Geithner isn't serious about restoring Glass-Steagall or any of the other FDR-era reforms, and they notice that, too.

What they fear is that their dollars will plunge in value. They are eying one another, afraid to dump their dollars for fear of triggering a panic and taking a bath. But they're afraid if they don't dump their dollars first, they'll get the the worst of it. All of them have their fingers poised on the "sell" button.

Thus far they are not panicking. They are quietly signaling their concern and hoping someone in the Obama Administration picks up on it and does the right thing to safeguard their dollar reserves. Thus far their signals have fallen on deaf ears. We are taking their statements literally. "Oh, a multi-national currency? Yes, that's a very interesting idea. We'll have to include discussion of that at some future meeting. Pass the canapes, will you?"

There will be no more warnings. Stronger rhetoric would trigger the panic they hope to avoid. They are poised on a knife-edge of uncertainty, and it will not take much to push them off the edge.