Years of financing trade imbalances, budget deficits, wars, and social programs without benefit of spending cuts or tax increases are helping to pull down an already wobbly dollar. And our biggest creditors, the Asians (Japanese and Chinese), have grown restive. It’s a recipe for calamity that could crater your investments along with the American currency. It’s not too late to protect your portfolio.

I have long enjoyed watching how the world’s currencies fluctuate in value relative to one another. These trades are real-time referendums on what the investors everywhere think about any and all of them. My job as a global investor is to sort through the clues and connect the dots before others do. It is a game of wit and luck and an important tool for preserving and increasing one’s wealth. But these days, the game is anything but enjoyable. We appear to be in a rare, multigenerational transition period that turns the investment world inside out and renders historic perspective useless.