The first two months of trade data are now available and it’s not a particularly pretty picture locally or nationally. The national numbers suggest the possibility of a problem for the U.S. economy. The Miami numbers suggest una problema for Latin America. The context is also important. The Federal Reserve has been hand-wringing over when to tighten interest rates after years of loose fiscal policy — in the next couple of months or later this year — and the March job numbers released 10 days ago were surprisingly disappointing after months of strong hiring. Because it’s only February and only two months of import-export data are available, there is a danger in reading too much into the data. What’s at first striking about the national numbers is the name of the No. 1 ranked Customs district. It’s not Los Angeles. It’s New York City, according to WorldCity analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released recently. New York City has rarely finished ahead of Los Angeles on an annual basis in the last two decades. One of those years, ironically, was 2001, the year of the New York City and Washington, D.C., terrorist strikes that hobbled the U.S. economy. The impact of the terrorist strikes, from a trade perspective, was felt most acutely in Los Angeles, which leads the nation in imports, particularly Chinese and other Asian imports that fill our stores and, eventually, homes and offices.