A dollar here, a dollar there.

Pretty soon you can learn some things about what's happening to this economy.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risnell.

It is Thursday, today the 13th of March.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

You are familiar with the major stock indexes, yes?

The Dow, the NASDAQ, and the S&P, about which today, by the way, can we just not?

We, though, are going to talk about a different index as a way to get started today, one less familiar, perhaps, but no less important. It's the

U.S. dollar index, just like it sounds, a gauge of the greenback against the other major

currencies. And we are talking about it because it's down more than five and a half

percent from a more than two-year high on inauguration day, falling really sharply in just the

past couple of weeks. We should mention here that leading up to the election in November,

until mid-January, the dollar was on a roll. The U.S. economy was the strongest in the world.

Markets figured the Federal Reserve was going to cut interest rates some more before too long, and the tax cuts and other fiscal stimuli were coming. Things are, as you know, different now, and that's playing out in the foreign exchange markets. Marketplace is Mitchell Hartman gets us going.

Textbook economics will tell you that significant sustained shifts in a currency's value can

indicate a country's economic strength or weakness. And says Jonas Goulterman at Capital

Economics, the recent rise in the euro versus the U.S. dollar?

It's a pretty sizable move. The euro, it's about 6% up against the dollar.

And the move last week in the euro was one of the biggest over the past three, four decades.

It's a significant reversal in economic fortunes, says political economist Cherin O'Halloran at Trinity College, Dublin.

Last year, the U.S. was doing well, while Europe was very sluggish.

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