Here are a few familiar descriptions of the dollar: “the cleanest shirt in the laundry basket”, “the least-ugly mug in a beauty contest”, “the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind”. Nobody, it seems, loves the dollar; they just really dislike the alternatives. And that aversion is only growing. The dxy, an index of the dollar against half a dozen major currencies, is at a 20-year high (see chart 1). Among the dirtiest of the dirty linen are sterling, the euro and the yen (see chart 2).
