U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar (But it won't be replaced with Carbon Credits)

UPDATE below.
From Reuters:

A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.

"It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency," he said....MORE

Also from Reuters:

Global carbon price unlikely for 10-15 years: analysts

A single global price for carbon emissions is not likely for another 10 to 15 years because governments are dragging their heels on legislation, market analysts said on Wednesday.

"By 2025, we could have one single currency," orbeo carbon analyst Emmanuel Fages said at a Point Carbon emissions trading conference in Copenhagen.

The European Union's executive Commission hopes to have a global carbon market in which emissions trading schemes are linked by 2020. It wants to see national schemes in all OECD countries by 2013 and for those to be linked by 2015.

Cap-and-trade schemes force participants, often energy-intensive industries, to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which is produced from burning fossil fuels.

Analysts said a global carbon market would help achieve real emissions cuts in planet-warming greenhouse gases, but the EU's goals were too ambitious and a global price for carbon would only emerge in 2015-20.

"The big issue is the Commission wants to link with the U.S. by 2015. That looks incredibly ambitious," Trevor Sikorski, an analyst at Barclays Capital, said....MORE

UPDATE: See also, "At G20, Kremlin to Pitch New Currency"