Article Source Following up on this post from October 2006, when oil was only $58.88 (WTI,daily average) a barrel, consider this excerpt from today's Thomas Net: The impact of rising transportation costs, driven significantly by high oil prices, is already being seen in capital-intensive manufacturing that carry a high ratio of freight costs to the final sale price. But a new report has determined that higher energy prices are affecting transport costs at such an unprecedented rate that "the cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today." The CIBC report upon which this article is based focuses on ship transport. One interesting tidbit: The cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container from East Asia to the US eastern seaboard has already tripled since 2000 and will double again as oil prices head towards $200 per barrel... The note discusses how the decreasing in tradability of ...

Today we are going to be analyzing the U.S. Dollar Index.

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at what makes up the U.S. Dollar Index. The U.S. Dollar Index is a basket that consists of six foreign currencies. These are the Euro, the Yen, the Cable, the Loonie, the Krona, and the Franc. The index is made up of six currencies, but it includes seventeen countries. Japan, Great Britain, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland are added to the twelve members of the European Union whom represent the Euro. These seventeen countries may only be a small percentage of the countries in the world, but there are many other currencies that follow the U.S. Dollar Index closely. The index is a great tool for measuring the global strength of the United States Dollar.

The components of the U. S. Dollar Index have a geometric weighted average. This is to factor in …