This post was part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2007 feature. The voting has now closed and readers have chosen the weak dollar and rising oil and gold prices as the money story of the year. Be sure to let us know in the comments if you are pleased with this result.

As we approach the end of 2007, we now have a really tough question to answer. What is the Money Story of 2007? What are the candidates?

The Boom and Bust in Private Equity Buyouts

As we entered 2007, no one could imagine the activity with private equity firms around the world. Private equity firms were supposed to be the new Masters of the Universe, ushering in a new Gilded Age not seen since 1920s. We saw this with the initial public offering of the Blackstone Group, the premiere private equity group. This was followed by a series of public and semi-public offerings by other organizations, such as Apollo Group.

However, the new Roaring '20s was relatively short-lived with the credit crunch. This caused most merger activity, including corporate buyouts, to come to grinding halt. Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX) now trades substantially below its high price. Who could guess that private equity would experience a boom and bust all in the same year? However, before you dismiss private equity as an element of the past, remember that most of these firms still have substantial cash available ready to invest when conditions are ripe.

Bloomberg News reports that Gisele Bundchen is not the only celebrity swapping dollars for Euros. Now Jay-Z is flaunting his preference for the Euro. In a video for the movie "American Gangster," hip-hop maestro Jay-Z thumbs through a wad of 500-euro notes on a night of cruising through the concrete canyons of New York, a city where the dollar -- not the Euro -- is legal tender.

Does this warrant comment from distinguished economists? Bloomberg News thinks so. Jeffrey Garten, a Yale School of Business professor who was the Commerce Department's undersecretary for international trade in the Clinton administration opined: "What we're seeing is a very broad rebalancing of economic and political power in the world. The scales are moving, and they're moving quite fast."

With the dollar down 60% since January 2001, the decline in the dollar is probably going to be hard to reverse. Harvard University professor Kenneth Froot, who has been a consultant to the Fed said, "There is no doubt that the dollar must sink against periphery currencies to reflect their increase in competitiveness and productivity."

If you agree with Garten, Froot, Bundchen, and Jay-Z, it may be time to buy Euros. Or maybe it's too late.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.

Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen earned $33 million in the first six months of the year. And when Bundchen signed on to do commercials for Pantene, she made an an unusual request: She wanted to be payed in the currency of her native Brazil not U.S. dollars. Early reports had said she was being paid in euros, but her manager said she was in fact being paid in real.

According to Bloomberg, "That's turned out to be the better choice. The real has risen 21.3% against the dollar this year, while the euro gained 10.4%. The real is the best performer among the 26 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg, thanks to burgeoning global demand for Brazil's commodity exports. Only the Canadian dollar has strengthened more among major currencies, up 21.8%. "

What do we make of this? Well perhaps Etrade NASDAQ: ETFC) should hire her to manage its investments -- that is if it can top the pay package Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) presents when it offers her the CEO job.

As for me, I'll be asking AOL to pay me in Shekels -- or perhaps wheat futures. If I really want to get rich, I could even ask for China Finance Online (NASDAQ: JRJC) puts.

ALSO SEE: Gisele Bundchen dumps the dollar, demands payment in euros