Just the other day I got an email in which Ron Paul, libertarian icon, former member of Congress from Texas and father of the Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, eagerly proclaimed that his “final prediction of a dollar collapse is about to become reality.”
The email was a bit extreme, perhaps, with references to the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the Book of Genesis. But Mr. Paul’s dire premonition fits within an overarching Republican proposition that the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are relentlessly undermining the American economy.
Other, more serene analysts have also predicted a weak dollar. Martin Feldstein, who was a top economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, argued some five years ago that the country’s large trade deficit and ultralow interest rates, coupled with sales of United States assets by international investors and changes in the Chinese economy, would push the dollar down over coming years.
They were exactly wrong. The dollar’s rise, which started virtually the day Professor Feldstein made his prediction in 2011, shows little sign of abating. It amounts to only the third instance of such consistent appreciation since Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971.
The American economy might just be bumbling along, but it is doing substantially better than the rest of the advanced industrial world. “It is quite natural,” said Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, “that the currency of the country whose economy is least bad should have the least worst currency.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/business/economy/the-dollar-keeps-rising-for-good-or-evil.html?ref=economy&_r=0 
