Countries that hold large amounts of the dollar are showing a new willingness to dump the dollar in favor of the rising euro.
Last week, the United Arab Emirates announced that it would shift more of its currency reserves away from the dollar, joining countries like Russia, Switzerland and Venezuela.
Those moves come amid ambiguous recent signals from China about possibly pulling back from the dollar, and word last week from Iran, one of the largest oil producers, that it would prefer euro payments for oil, which typically is priced in dollars.
But currency experts said that, for a number of reasons, these turns away from the dollar were not likely to inflict long-term damage on the currency's value.
First, the motives of central banks that are adding other currencies to their reserves do not appear to be driven by the belief that the euro eventually will supplant the dollar as the world's currency. Rather, these central banks are doing what investors typically do to minimize risk: diversifying portfolios.
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