The above chart shows the dollar’s performance since the Fed announced its Quantitative Easing program. This chart tells us two things:

1.Americans just got 15% poorer on the world stage thanks to Ben Bernanke

2.A currency crisis is in the works (and perhaps already starting)

Regarding #1: When the financial crisis hit, the Fed realized it would need to keep interest rates low while it attempted to bail out the banks (80% of the $200+ trillion in derivatives sitting on commercial banks’ balance sheets are related to interest rates).

The problem with this is that it makes Treasuries very unattractive to foreign investors (China & Japan) who want a higher yield. Consequently, the Fed decided to pick up the slack by buying $300 billion worth of Treasuries through the now famous Quantitative Easing program.

As I noted last week, the Fed is now the largest buyer of US debt (it bought more debt than the next three largest buyers combined in 2Q09). China and Japan are no one’s fools. And they’re not going to fund a monetary policy that is both profligate and likely to erode the value of their dollar holdings.

I am not a huge fan of technical analysis, but it is a useful tool for navigating a trader-heavy, liquidity driven, manipulated market such as today’s. On that note, I want to point out that the dollar began forming a falling bullish wedge pattern starting in June (see above chart). This pattern entails an ever-tightening range of lower highs and lower lows and typically precedes major breakouts to the upside.

As you can see, the dollar broke down out of this pattern in late September. It then rallied back up into the trading range before breaking down again. This is bad news. The next line of support (place where the dollar could bounce) is 76. We've already broken that one too.