Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- For all the concern over the $1.6 trillion U.S. budget deficit and record debt load, the dollar is as valuable now as 35 years ago.

Measured against a basket of currencies from the Group of 10 nations proportioned by how they trade against each other, the greenback is up about 3 percent since 1975, according to Bloomberg Correlation-Weighted Currency Indexes. That was four years after the Bretton Woods agreement, set up in 1944 to link currencies to the price of gold, collapsed. The U.K. pound has dropped 34 percent and the Canadian dollar has fallen 6 percent.

The U.S. dollar gained 6 percent since November after losing 12 percent in the first 11 months of 2009 as measured by the Bloomberg index. Barclays Capital and Morgan Stanley say the U.S. will grow faster than the rest of the developed world this year and 2011. At the same time, Europe faces worsening finances in Greece, Spain and Portugal, Japan’s economy is struggling and concerns about valuations in emerging markets are increasing.

“To quote Mark Twain, the reports of the dollar’s demise have been greatly exaggerated,” said Win Thin, a senior currency strategist in New York at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which manages about $40 billion in assets.