The Day of the Dollar

Do we live on a bubble? Is it possible for the heavily indebted American economy to collapse and take all of us down in a free fall with it? Have the days of the dollar been counted? Is it really unimaginable that we will see the time of the Great Depression repeating itself? VPRO Backlight and Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad present this ‘what if’ scenario. What if the dollar collapses? Fiction meets facts in this 24 hour scenario. At 9AM a Singapore trader is ordered to sell a large amount of dollars, which sends off the enormous downfall of the dollar. This film shows the results for the world economy every following hour. It ends in Amsterdam, where the only currency accepted by a taxi driver is cigarettes…

History seems to have caught up with this 2005 film, though in slow-motion… Includes interview with annalist Stephen Roach, Andy Xie, Maarten Schinkel, Cees Maas, Rob de Wijk and Kees Vendrik.