Leo Melamed, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, took control in 1969 and introduced currencyfutures and the International Monetary Market to the exchange.
This data package, coupled with the intellectual property that enables appropriate time-delimited monopoly pricing to extract returns over time, is what creates the futuresmarket for their currency.
You can get the currency exposure either by purchasing short-term paper issued by the flaky government in question or by taking a long position in the futuresmarket for that currency.
The economy is improving, but Jessica Hoversen, a foreign exchange and fixed-income futures analyst at MF Global, warns that the currencymarket may have already overextended itself in the short term, while long-term trends endanger the U.S. dollar.