It wasn’t a fancy gourmet store, just a chain supermarket in the suburbs, but that made the sticker shock all the more shocking. There it was, in a display of plastic-wrapped cheeses, a small and moldy morsel with a printout label proclaiming that its price was a mere $19.99 per pound. I felt sure that, not very many weeks before, I had seen that same cheese selling for less than half of that. What was going on here?

A glance at its label showed the cheese was imported from Europe. Aha! – mystery solved. The European currency, the euro, which once traded for less than 90 American cents, is now worth more than $1.30. Indeed, just yesterday it rose sharply, from $1.3060 to $1.3220 – only slightly below the all-time high of $1.3667 it hit in December.

The cheese in the display case was the same as it had always been – curdled milk with a bit of mold – but the dollars in my wallet had lost a lot of their buying power.

Well, of course I did what any red-blooded, patriotic American would do under the circumstances: I bought a piece of domestic cheese that was much less expensive. But it made me wonder: How long before American cheese-makers take advantage of their competitive advantage and raise their prices, too? And what effect would that have on inflation? Does the Bureau of Labor Statistics include smelly cheese in the hypothetical “market basket” it uses to compute the cost of living?

Aside from the possible threat of inflation, isn’t $20-a-pound imported cheese sure to cause dislocations in the marketplace? Surely those European cheesemakers will see their share of the American market shrink, making their businesses less profitable – and through no fault of their own. Contrariwise, won’t producers and exporters of American made goods see their share of the world market expand, causing their profits to swell? That sounds plausible, but who are those producers and exporters? With 80%-plus of the American economy geared to providing services, not products, how much benefit can we expect from exports stimulated by a cheaper dollar?

And what about the financial markets? Won’t all those foreign governments and overseas investors so active on Wall Street find American securities less attractive if the dollar keeps on shrinking? And if there is reduced demand for those securities – the stocks, bonds, and mutual funds that are in your portfolio and mine – won’t that cause their value to shrink as well? Yesterday’s drop in the dollar was triggered, according to most analysts, by an announcement by the government of South Korea that it was planning to “diversify” its foreign currency reserves.

And then there is the problem of benchmarking. The U.S. dollar, whether or not it deserves to be called “almighty” by foreign investors or trading partners, remains our standard of value. We track our success on the job by how many dollars we take home at the end of the week. We judge the quality of our investments based on how many dollars they gain or lose for us. But if the dollar is something less than a dollar when measured against other currencies – or when it comes to purchasing fancy dairy products or other goods produced outside America – how meaningful has that judgment become?

I remember once hearing a geologist explain the problem of tracking long-term changes in the planet’s sea level. It might seem very simple, he said, because the sea leaves its unmistakable mark on every body of land it touches; the difficulty is that, because of tectonic plate movements, volcanoes, and other forces, those bodies of land keep rising and falling as well. How long can the dollar continue to suffer from “that sinking feeling” before it is replaced by somebody else’s currency as the international standard? Will we Americans need to recalculate our pay stubs and earnings reports into euros or Swiss francs or pounds sterling before we can determine how well we’re doing?

And as if all that weren’t enough to worry about, it bugs me that I’ll never know whether the cheese I bought that day was quite as tasty as the $20-a-pound fromage that got away.