Washington ? The high-flying dollar, which has given Americans price breaks on everything from Paris vacations to imported cars and television sets, is losing altitude.

During the past three months, the dollar has slipped by 6 percent against major currencies, raising concerns that this could be the end of a heady seven-year run as the world’s supercurrency.

“I think we are at a turning point for the dollar, and we are looking for an extended period when the dollar will be declining in value against other currencies,” David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s Co. in New York, said Wednesday.

For American shoppers, the past seven years have been a great ride. The dollar stood 40 percent higher in value against the major currencies of the world in January than it did at its low point in the spring of 1995 quite a price break on foreign goods for American consumers.

American manufacturers, however, have a different story to tell. The dollar’s strength has opened them to intense competition from lower-priced imports and made their exports more expensive overseas.

The National Association of Manufacturers, leading a drive to pressure the Bush administration to change its policy on the dollar, estimates that the overvalued dollar has cost U.S. companies $140 billion in lost export sales during the past 18 months and resulted in half a million job layoffs.

So far, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, the administration’s spokesman on the dollar, has been unwilling to waver from the policy set by his Clinton administration predecessors, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, whose mantra remained: “A strong dollar is in the best interests of the United States.”

O’Neill, with his usual bluntness, told the Senate Banking Committee on May 1, “There is no intent with anything I say to give comfort to those who think I am going to change our policy.”

But even with those words, the dollar has continued to fall on the world’s currency markets, where $1.2 trillion worth of currencies change hands daily.