If you require the services of Gisele Bundchen, from now on you will have to pay her in euros. Dollars are no longer good enough for the German supermodel and she has not yet got round to demanding gold.

Other people, though, have despaired of all paper money so that yesterday they bid the yellow metal - the ultimate non-interest-bearing store of wealth - up to $822.50 an ounce, its highest price for 28 years.

It is all about the headlong flight from the world's one and only reserve currency. There are just not enough euros around for the purpose. Anyway some euro-denominated government bonds are more equal than others. German bonds may be thought less likely to default than, say, Greek, although both are priced in euros.

Britain abandoned the old sterling area back in Harold Wilson's time, largely because friendly and trusting countries which held their national wealth in pounds became understandably less friendly and trusting when it was devalued.

That seems not to bother the Americans nowadays. When the Fed cut its official US interest rate last week, it put out a careful statement indicating that it may have finished cutting for a while and has not necessarily gone soft on inflation. The currency markets paid not a blind bit of notice, just went on dumping dollars.

Since getting on for half the world has money linked to a greater or lesser extent to the dollar, that is a terrible flood of wealth gushing down the drain - far more than the banks have lost in sub-prime mortgages.

Yet in some ways this dollar devaluation suits the Americans rather well. Their trade deficit, supposedly a prime cause of their malaise, is shrinking, along with the value of the billions of export earnings the Chinese have recycled back into US Treasuries.

American companies are having some welcome success with what have become keenly priced exports. Conversely German industry's export orders to countries outside the eurozone fell by nearly four per cent in September.

Trends like these rarely peter out. They end in drama. George Soros said mischievously the other day "I know exactly where the currencies are going, but I'm not going to tell that to you." That sounds like talking the dollar down without saying so on the record. Remember, it was Mr Soros who collected several hundred million from the Bank of England in 1992 when it tried to stop him driving sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

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So PetroChina, not Exxon Mobil, is the biggest company in the world now in terms of stock market value. So, in 1989, was NTT, a Japanese phone company. It is hard to beat the markets, but that does not stop them being heroically wrong every now and again. Trouble comes when they put right these colossal errors. The price for Japan was the ruin of a generation of private investors and 15 years of stagnation.

The best that can be said for Chinese shares this time is that Government restrictions have kept foreign investors pretty well clear of them.