Quote from peilthetraveler:
I dont know how much better traders would be. Imagine this...whatever broker you use has 10 of 1000s of traders. (maybe even in the millions if you are with someone like scottrade) Now imagine there is an overnight currency crisis. There are 1000s of people that had short positions and say the dow went from 10,700 to 300,000 overnight because of this. The shorts did not get their 50 dollar short stop lossed out at $53. They got stop lossed out at $4,500 meaning not only did they get wiped out, but the broker has to eat what was not covered in the account. Multiply that by nearly everyone selling their stocks at these new high prices and trying to pull cash out to spend on food before the dollar gets even worse and you will find that the broker can cover all these people trying to pull money out because of all the money they lost with the people who were short. Brokerage get shut down and you are only covered up to 500k by SIPC, but 500k is only enough to buy a couple of tanks of gas now that the dollar collapsed.
So even if you make money on paper from a currency collapse...getting that money might be another story. Remember when things go crazy, the government does crazy stuff. Remember when they took all the gold out of banks? Remember when the shut down the stock market for a week after 9/11 and froze accounts of anyone that made too much money? If you make a killing with the currency crisis, do not think that the government is beyond taking that money from you. If you have silver or gold, you can at least hide it.