Lara Rhame Trade Quotations

The trade number at best leaves the dollar where it was and at worst sparks a substantial dollar decline.

I see the trade gap stabilizing, but it's hard to see it narrowing unless you get the U.S. consumer shutting down.

That's one of the reasons the dollar came off at the end of last week, ... and could come off even more on Wednesday, when Greenspan speaks. He could be setting the foundation for a more range-bound trade for this coming quarter.

It is a modest dollar negative; the trade data combined with the claims data, but the focus this morning is very much on digesting the BOJ and on payrolls tomorrow.

We're getting to a phase where European data could have more of an impact because a solid U.S. economic scenario is so widely expected. The markets are also very thin, so traders aren't taking on large amounts of risk.

This shows our big reliance on imports and foreign capital. As the dollar weakens, that becomes a more and more expensive habit. It makes our imports more expensive, makes the trade deficit wider, makes us even more dependent on foreign capital, weakening the dollar, on and on -- it's a vicious cycle.