At the end of 1998, the staff of the Federal Reserve Board introduced a new set of indexes of the foreign exchange value of the U.S. dollar. The staff made the changeover, from indexes that had been used since the late 1970s, for two reasons. First, five of the ten currencies in the staff's...

During the third quarter of 2001, the dollar depreciated 7.3 percent against the euro and 4.1 percent against the yen. On a trade-weighted basis, the dollar ended the quarter 2.6 percent lower. Economic data released even before the terrorist attacks on September 11 suggested that the U.S....