Dollar looking sickly...

It's a holiday shortened week, so maybe we shouldn't read too much into it. But the dollar is really taking it on the chin today. The euro is up by almost a cent ... the British pound is breaking out to a new 26-year high of 2.0163-dollars-to-every-1-pound ... and high-flying currencies like the Aussie dollar and New Zealand dollar are really surging (up by more than a percent each). The Chinese yuan has also set a new high against the buck.

Even the lowly Japanese yen is tacking on some gains, as you can see in the chart above (in this spot currency chart, a move down indicates the yen is gaining in value against the dollar). We're clearly at an important technical level ... the question now is whether the market holds.

What's prompting the dollar beating? Tough to say. It's not as if today's U.S. economic data was weak -- the ISM manufacturing index came in at 56 in June, up from 55 a month earlier. Economists expected no change from May, per Bloomberg. It's interesting to note that the dollar got creamed in the thin markets surrounding the Thanksgiving 2006 holiday, too.