Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial on money, how it works,

how to invest it, how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host David Stein, today's

episode 404. It's titled, Why is the US dollar so strong? Will it continue? The US dollar

is the strongest it has been since the year 2000. By strong, I mean US dollar is worth

more when converting it to a different currency. The US dollar can buy more when you exchange

it and then try to buy things in a different country. A strong US dollar means imports

into the US or cheaper and exports from US to other countries are more expensive, including

the massive food exports that the US sends around the world. Last week in our weekly email

newsletter, The Insiders Guide, I wrote about how Japan hadn't opened up its country to

let informed visitors. The next day they did. And a few days after that, my son, my

old son booked a trip to Japan. I mentioned he'd been trying to get back there for a number

of years but wasn't able to. It's an excellent time to travel to Japan because the

yen is the weakest it's been relative to the US dollar since 1998, which means Camden's

money will go further when he visits Japan here in a few weeks. Last week, the British

pound fell 4% relative to the dollar in one day. King dollar is how financial times columnist

Kate Martin put it. As word preside, an economics professor at Cornell wrote, for the rest

of the world, it's a no win situation. The strong dollar is what he's referring to.

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times wrote in Nigeria and Somalia where the risk of starvation

already lurks. The strong dollar is pushing up the price of imported food, fuel and medicine.

The strong dollar is nudging debt-ridden Argentina, Egypt and Kenya closer to default and threatening

to discourage foreign investment in emerging markets like India and South Korea. What happened

such that US dollar is so dominant, so strong, which is four years ago in episode 215.

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