Pity the once-mighty greenback. Back during the Clinton years, treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers ceaselessly intoned the mantra "A strong dollar is in our national interest," and the markets cooperated by driving its value against the major foreign currencies steadily higher. That momentum continued through the first year of the Bush Administration.

But for the past three years, the film has been running in reverse. Bush's hapless treasury secretaries, Paul O'Neill and John Snow, have tried intoning the mantra, but with little conviction and no cooperation from the markets. Between the February 2002 peak and the December 2004 low in the value of the dollar, our currency lost 35 percent of its value against the euro, 22 percent against the Japanese yen and even 24 percent against the Canadian dollar. The greenback rallied weakly for the first several months of the year, but the gain amounted to no more than a few percentage points.

Why? And does it matter to those of us who aren't invested in currency strength as some kind of phallic symbol?

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