Carlos Garcia

Currency and foreign exchange · Calc UK

Currency
Exchange rates
Travel money

Carlos worked on a dealing desk before he wrote a word for anyone, which is where he acquired a lasting irritation with the phrase "today's exchange rate". There is no such thing as one rate: there is a mid-market reference, and then there is what you are quoted, and the distance between the two is the entire subject.

He looks after the currency pages and the conversion tables, and reviews anything where money crosses a border. What he wants a visitor to leave with is a sense of scale — roughly what a conversion should cost, so that a bad quote at an airport counter or inside a card's fine print is recognisable as bad before it is accepted.

He also keeps an eye on how figures are written, since a decimal comma read as a decimal point has caused more expensive mistakes than any rate move.

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Carlos Garcia

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