Last Monday was the fortieth birthday of the United States dollar as a fiat currency-that is, a currency backed not by a precious metal, or something solid like it,but by the promissory authority of a government.On August15,1971,President Nixon, after a secret meeting at Camp David with his economic advisers,closed the gold window and effectively ended the gold standard. Henceforth, the Federal Reserve would no longer exchange other central bank's dollars, or anyone's, for gold at a fixed price. Instead, it could print as much money as it felt it needed to.?

Forty, as anyone who has turned it can attest, is, at best, an occasion for ambivalence and, at worst, a bracing peek over the top of the hill.For its four-decade birthday, last week, Paper Dollar, Jr.,was confettied with grim statistics and hooted anew by goldbugs and critics of the Fed. The slide show of P.D.,Jr.'s life, to be sure, features some ugly bits--inflation,recession,rising unemployment,harmful speculation,ballooning debt. The regime of which the dollar is the centerpiece, in its role as the world's reserve currency, is now teetering. It is a shadow of itself. Stooped and arthritic, it smells of mothballs and can no longer afford its beloved Swiss chocolates.It keeps forgetting our names and getting lost on the way home. Still, the average life expectancy for a flat currency is twenty-seven years; so, by that measure, the greenback has had a good run. Speech! Speech!?