The simple facts are that the American Dollar is losing value because the money supply is to loose; you can blame this on either the $500,000,000,000 deficit the government is running or on the historically low treasury rate. This problem is being made worse because central banks around the world are lowering their reserves of American dollars in favour of more stable currencies (the currency of choice is the Euro but the Great Britian Pound, the Canadian Dollar and the Austrailian Dollar have also seen increased holdings).
Now, commodity traders don't care about the underlying economy of the currency they trade in they simply want a stable currency in order to limit their risk of holding or exchanging money. There are really only a handful of economies large enough for their currency to handle commodity traders without impacting the value of the currency; these are the Japaneese Yen, American Dollar, Great Britian Pound and the Euro.
Being that commodities traders are losing a lot of money because how unstable the American dollar has been for the past 5 years there is a movement to switch to trading Oil, Natural Gas, Gold, Silver and a variety of other commodities to the Euro rather than the American Dollar. Most people are being patient mainly because it costs a lot of money to produce a new futures exchange, but if the American Dollar continues on its path I would expect to see many traders push for a European futures exchange to become the new home of these commodities.
