lauren goodwin is director at frontier strategy group and she joins us now. welcome here. >> nice to be here. >> let's start with the strong dollar and how it might be impacting the u.s. multinationals. what do you think? >> i think that the dollar will remain strong and will strengthen throughout the rest of the year so looking to in the second half of 2015 we do believe that when the federal reserve raises interest rates that the dollar will strengthen even further. and for, when it comes to u.s. companies, dollar's strength isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the unpredictability of currencies globally can be difficult to plan for. >> what does the strong dollar mean for the economies of the emerging market? some of which are heavily commodity dependent. >> sure. well when it comes to simply the strong dollar local currencies being more weakly valued makes the input to production that tend to come from abroad more expensive. so all of your sugar or your glass might be more expensive coming from other places. and particularly commodity-dependent markets stil