Dollar goes down as oil prices go up.

• Position: Economics

America's working families have been squeezed for most of this decade by stagnant wages and diminishing health and retirement benefits, maintains the Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C. Now, they face new economic pressures from rising gasoline, food, heating, and electricity prices. A portion of those higher costs are attributable directly to the weakening of the dollar and the economic policies that have produced that weak dollar, according to a CAP report.

The value of energy companies' domestic reserves increases in proportion to the dollar's decline. At the beginning of 2001, ExxonMobil shares traded at less than $36 apiece. By early 2008, the share price had jumped to nearly $85. For most of that period, the increase matched almost precisely the appreciation in the price of a barrel of crude oil.

The fall of the dollar has affected oil prices in two specific ways: as the dollar falls against the euro and other major currencies, oil-exporting states have been demanding more dollars per barrel of oil to protect their ability to meet expenses paid in euros and other currencies and, more recently, retirement funds, hedge funds, speculators, and...