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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Because USD aren't legal tender in the Eurozone, so you couldn't actually buy anything with them. You could change your euros into pounds and move to Britain, except your job, family, friends, and so forth are still back home (and once everyone gets that idea, it's not going to work for a million reasons).

Now if you're talking about people with investments in EUR who could switch that over to USD, well yeah, the exchange rate doesn't seem to have crashed. Hm, can you short a currency somehow?

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Now if you're talking about people with investments in EUR who could switch that over to USD, well yeah, the exchange rate doesn't seem to have crashed.

With all the doom and gloom about the Euro, why hasn't it crashed against other currencies?

What effect would a breakup of the Euro zone actually have on the Euro?

Of course you will need Euros for day to day expenses. The idea would be to move your savings onto USD or GBP before the exchange rates spike and convert them back into $local_currency after things in europe settle down.

     ...can you short a currency somehow?

If you have the right brokerage account you can trade currency futures and options but be careful. Such trading is generally very leveraged and the possibility of losing all of your principle is very real(1) so be sure you understand the risks.

(1) this does not apply to buying options.

It's a lot easier to keep your money in a foreign currency these days. You could, say, put all your euros in a dollar denominated US bank account and then just use an ATM to convert only what you're about to spend back into euros.

"Hm, can you short a currency somehow?"

Check out Proshares UltraShort Euro http://www.proshares.com/funds/euo.html

Just a note: Short and leveraged ETFs are designed to match intraday movement and are poorly suited for long-term holding. It says as much on the website.

To wit: YTD EUR/USD is down .2% and that ETF is down 5%.

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