Want to get to the top financially? Take advice from those who are already there.

At a glance

Name: Keith Cameron Smith
Hometown: Ormond Beach, Fla.
Education: Calvary Christian Academy, Ormond Beach, Fla.

Career highlights:

● Author of the national best-seller, "The Spiritual Millionaire" and "The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class"

● Entrepreneur and self-made millionaire at age 33

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil futures surged to a new record near $94 Monday, propelled by the weak dollar and news that Mexico's state oil company had suspended a fifth of its oil production due to stormy weather.

Crude futures rallied late in the session as the euro rebounded against the dollar, analysts said. The euro hit a record high against the dollar early Monday morning, then declined only to rally back later in the day.

"The dollar seems to be the force that's driving us now," said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp., in Chicago.

The dollar's descent against other major currencies has drawn investors to crude futures as a hedge against the weakening currency and made dollar-denominated oil futures less expensive to people dealing in other currencies, said David Moore, commodities strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.

Oil prices were also supported by news that Mexico's Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, was to temporarily

The dollar hasn't been this low in a decade, but it's headed lower. By the end of 2007, we can expect the dollar to buy 11.6% less versus the euro than it did at the beginning of the year.

As the dollar continues its slide, count on Wall Street to gear up its fear machine.

Any further retreat in the dollar will put the U.S. currency on the edge of unexplored territory. The fall of the U.S. dollar into unknown territory, the argument is likely to go, would break the will of those overseas central banks, from Russia to Saudi Arabia to China, that have been buying dollars to give their countries' exports a competitive edge.

Well, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that scenario. Wall Street could, of course, scare itself into a dollar rout because many of the folks who work there are so traumatized by the crises in the markets for mortgages and for buyout loans that they're likely to jump at shadows, even when the shadows are of