The supercharged dollar is almost everyone's problem—but it's the one challenge that the masters of the global economy can't directly address.

The U.S. currency has soared almost 15 percent this year, on course for the biggest gain since the early 1980s. Nations across Asia and Latin America have been tapping their foreign reserves in an effort to shore up their currencies, prompting a caution from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) about the need to be prudent and preserve resources for potentially worse turmoil to come.

The big worry for the rest of the world is that the Federal Reserve's campaign to tame runaway inflation by jacking up U.S. interest rates—a key driver of the dollar's strength—is nowhere near done yet. That means currency pressures could get even worse, as dollar gains help contain consumer prices in the U.S. while threatening to send them spiraling higher everywhere else.