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How about a little currency speculation? No, no high-tech software solutions, nor financial expertise, are necessary to play this game, and the variables are in fact reduced to one. We’re talking another wacky Paddy Power novelty bet here, namely “AUD versus the EUR on 31st December 2009?”

Yeah, like you're gonna bet against this...

The odds table looks like so:

AUD worth 0.5600 or more: 5/6
AUD worth less than 0.5600: 5/6

See? Told you it was simple, despite Paddy’s own musing that it’s “Hard to predict in the current financial climate.”

Hard to predict, maybe, but let’s take a shot. Here’s a nice chart simply illustrating the performance of the Australian dollar against the Euro. Note the steady rise of the Aussie dollar through the year; just once week-on-week (the first week of February) did the Australian dollar drop versus the Euro.

Indeed, Australia appears to be performing reasonably well economically in hard times. Economists speculated that the crisis would be spreading to Oz only in 2009 – maybe because it takes so damn long to get there. Yet, in February (that month the dollar’s value dropped, recall), the Wall Street Journal admitted that “Australia’s economy has probably followed the US, UK, Japan and Europe into its first recession since 1991.”

“Probably,” he said!

And what was this analysis based on? Just that “Gross domestic product (GDP) rose a scant 0.1% in the third quarter, the weakest pace in eight years.”

So the always-strong Australian dollar *rose* by the small amount it had in this artificially wealth-bloated decade and that’s bad?

It says here that today that the AUD is worth 55.9040 Eurocents. The Os Man’s advice on this one is simple: Take the AUD on the over at Paddy Power, and enjoy your New Year’s Day.