Communities of color are twice as likely to take public transportation and many of these communities lack sufficient public transit options. The transportation sector in the United States is now the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The legislation will expand public transit options across every state in the country, replace thousands of deficient transit vehicles, including buses, with clean, zero emission vehicles, and improve accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities. This will improve U. Decades of neglect and underinvestment in our infrastructure have left the links in our goods movement supply chains struggling to keep up with our strong economic recovery from the pandemic.

The United States built modern aviation, but our airports lag far behind our competitors. According to some rankings, no U. Our ports and waterways need repair and reimagination too. Modern, resilient, and sustainable port, airport, and freight infrastructure will strengthen our supply chains and support U. Make the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. China already has 22, miles of high-speed rail, and is planning to double that by Build a national network of electric vehicle EV chargers.

That needs to change. The legislation will provide funding for deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work, and shop. Upgrade our power infrastructure to deliver clean, reliable energy across the country and deploy cutting-edge energy technology to achieve a zero-emissions future. According to the Department of Energy, power outages cost the U. It will upgrade our power infrastructure, by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy, while lowering costs.

And it will fund new programs to support the development, demonstration, and deployment of cutting-edge clean energy technologies to accelerate our transition to a zero-emission economy. Why is the dollar strong? Many investors see the dollar as the safest asset to hold when stock and bond markets turn volatile as they have this year. That's partly because the dollar has a unique status as the world's "reserve currency.

They do this because using a single currency rather than having to convert between currencies helps enable international investing and lending. The dollar has also gained strength because the US economy looks healthier than those of many other countries where growth is slower and debt and inflation higher than in the US. Europe in particular is struggling with high inflation and slowing growth due to energy supply disruptions resulting from the war in Ukraine and may already have entered a recession.

The dollar's strength also reflects the markets' views on the policies of various countries' governments and central banks. The Federal Reserve is focused on slowing inflation and is raising interest rates higher and faster than are central banks elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the UK, which is struggling with both high inflation and weak growth, has announced a package of tax cuts which has helped push the value of the pound against the dollar to its lowest point in decades. Is a strong dollar bad?

The most obvious risk a strong dollar poses is the way it can hurt the US stocks that many people rely on as mainstays of their retirement accounts. As Fidelity Director of Global Macro Jurrien Timmer explains, "When the dollar rises against, say, the euro, as it has done in the last year, then a company's euro-denominated sales are worth less once they're exchanged into dollars. Besides hurting earnings, a super-strong dollar can also hurt prices of US stocks and bonds by making them more expensive for big non-US institutional investors.

Faced with higher prices, they may opt to invest their money elsewhere, dragging US markets downward in the process. Or is a strong dollar good? While a strong dollar may hurt US stocks, it also makes international stocks a bargain for US investors who want to diversify their portfolios. Historically, international stocks have outperformed US stocks and they also have tended not to rise or fall in lockstep with US markets.

Over time, diversifying with non-US stocks may reduce risk in an investor's portfolio. The strong dollar may also help the stocks of non-US companies who operate in currencies such as the yen or euro but who export their products to the US. However, Fidelity Director of Quantitative Market Strategy Denise Chisholm warns against making major changes to your investments based on fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. A strong dollar makes imported goods cheaper for US consumers.

That may help cushion some of the impact of high inflation in the US, but much of the food and energy whose price increases are hitting households the hardest are produced in the US rather than imported, and continuing supply chain tangles are still likely to influence the prices of foreign-made goods at least as much currency values are.

Cheaper imports also create other problems for the US by increasing the country's trade deficit. Fidelity's Asset Allocation Research Team says that high levels of public and private debt are likely to mean returns from stock and bond investments may be lower in the decades ahead than they have been historically.

How long will the dollar stay strong?

Key takeaways The dollar has been gaining strength against the currencies of other major economies.

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