The federal reserve prints money that is not backed up by any real commodity, unlike when we had the gold standard and each dollar represented a bit of gold. When the fed prints money, this causes inflation. There are now more dollars competing for the same amount of real goods. This is what is meant by the "weakening" of the dollar. But there are consequences to inflation, the fed cannot monetize all of the 700 billion bailout because this would lead to hyper inflation, the value of a dollar would become so worthless that our economy would be reduced to a barter economy like in Weimar Germany. Inflation works in the same way as a tax. There are some economists who believe the federal reserve banking system is partly to blame for our current economic mess