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In his opinion, there would be gradual dollar weaknesses in coming years, but in the end the world would still find that the US unit remained the most practical.

At this stage, he viewed that the Chinese would lose if they quickly internationalised the yuan as an alternative to the US dollar.

An internationally-convertible yuan will make it more difficult to manage the currency in favour of China's trade and investment, even though Chinese authorities have repeatedly expressed concerns about the dollar's weakness, which has had serious impacts on China's assets, particularly its investments denominated in the US unit.

As a result, it will take years, before China floats the yuan and takes further steps to make its unit more practical for global trade and investment.

However, no one should under-estimate China's long-term intention to boost the international role of its currency.

For example, there were reports that China, Japan, Russia, France and oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf had held secret meetings to introduce a new unit for oil trading based on a basket of currencies, including the yen, yuan and euro, in a bid to replace the US dollar.

At the regional level, China has also taken steps to use the yuan in trading with countries in Southeast Asia. For bilateral trade with Thailand, Bangkok Bank was recently appointed the sole yuan clearing house in the country.

Earlier, China also announced its plan to issue its first batch of yuan-denominated bonds in Hong Kong.

For oil producers, weak currencies with chronic long-term problems are obviously not in their interest as it means less real income from exporting oil products.

Hence, they reportedly joined hands with other large economies such as China, Japan and France to discuss alternatives to the US dollar.

According to the Independent's report, entitled "The demise of US dollar", the secret talks - dismissed as groundless by authorities concerned - are aimed at replacing the dollar in 10 years.

The oil producers' concerns are serious, given the huge economic cost of the 2008 US and global financial crisis.

According to Sheehan's estimate, the best-case scenario shows that US$55 trillion (Bt1.8 quadrillion) was lost in a year since the 2008 US and global financial crisis.

In the worst-case, scenario, the damages could be as much as $82 trillion, equivalent to one and half year's worth of lost world GDP or five years of lost US GDP or six years of lost European Union GDP or 23 years of lost Chinese GDP.

These figures underline the magnitude of the damage inflicted on the US and world economy, and one of the biggest solutions so far has been the huge injection of new money by the US Federal Reserve into the system to jump-start the economy.

These trillions of dollars will lead to hyper-inflation and long-term dollar weakness unless there are miraculous solutions to cope with these consequences.

That is the reason experts on international trade and finance such as Eisuke Sakakibara, a former vice minister of finance of Japan, better known internationally as Mr Yen, recently suggested that the dollar probably has another 10-20 years to go as the pre-dominant international unit.

Though the writing is on the wall for the dollar, it cannot yet be written off.