And it's the flies that are on the money, despite the dollar getting so agonisingly close.

Its best hope would have been - not to put too fine a point on it - the impending collapse of the US banking system, only the authorities have since ruled that one out.

But that got me counting the crises we do have.

There's the oil crisis, the banking crisis in the US, the credit-crunch crisis everywhere, the housing crisis in the US, the interest rate crisis here, the weak US dollar crisis, the inflation crisis and the what-if-China-runs-out-of-steam-soon crisis.

But hang on. Where's the recession crisis?

Funny that, how the global economy has been doing remarkably well all things considered.

Maybe we're still two crises short of a catastrophe, but so far they're all different ways of looking at the same thing: the bursting of the banking bubble.

Not even the US is doing as badly as is suggested by Wall Street or, for that matter, the latest comments by US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke.

For all the downside risks that are around - sorry if I've missed any - nobody's noticed that the official annual growth forecast for the US was quietly lifted from 0.3 to 1.2percent to 1 to 1.6percent for this year. Next year's forecast is 2 to 2.8percent.

That's not an economy going gangbusters, but note how the lower-end figure has become bigger, contrary to the aforementioned crises.

Which is why I suspect the US dollar has seen the worst - and our dollar the best.

The first sign is Europe where a slowdown as great as, and probably greater, than in the US has begun, in no small part due to the euro being overvalued.

As the US dollar starts gathering momentum, you can forget about parity.

But as a sign of confidence returning to the US financial system, that's one crisis to look forward to.