The United Nations would like the dollar, euro, yen, and other national currencies to be succeeded by a new "global currency."

That recommendation appears in a U.N. report released this week, which suggests the dollar's outsize role in international finance has ended -- and says that it's time to invent a successor currency that would be managed by a "Global Reserve Bank."

Countries could "agree to exchange their own currencies for the new currency, so that the global currency would be backed by a basket of currencies of all the members," says the 218-page report from the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.

Keep in mind that this is a U.N. report written by bureaucrats without any actual legal ability to create the global equivalent of the Federal Reserve. Anyone who remembers how a U.N. agency once called for a global e-mail tax of one cent per 100 e-mail messages -- but didn't exactly get it -- can attest to that.