Slippin' and a Slidin' ...

Cano's Castle - Antonito, Colorado

Oh me oh my ... could this be the beginning of the long slow slide?

... this past week saw the greenback's biggest weekly loss in six weeks.

"This is the most serious assault on the dollar since January," said Steven Englander, chief currency strategist for the Americas at Barclays Capital in New York. "This feels different."

Why the decline? First, there was a dramatic downshift in the market expectations of how high interest rates will go. Most in the interest rate futures market believed that the Fed would raise rates to 4.75 percent by the end of the month, with a chance that they would raise to 5.25 percent by the middle of the year.

"Now, however, markets have taken all bets of a hike beyond five percent off the table, and are pricing in only three in four chance the Fed will even reach five percent," reports Reuters.

"This helped compress the spread between two-year U.S. and euro zone government debt to its narrowest level in favor of the dollar in 10 months."

Another factor conspiring against the dollar is the U.S. trade deficit. A U.S. Treasury Department reports shows that foreign purchases of U.S. securities were less than the amount needed to finance the trade deficit for the second month in a row."

Have you bought your gold/silver yet?