By Lauren Macy, IHI Project Manager It’s January 21, 2012, ATL to ACC tickets in my hand. Macy, Lauren flying from Boston to Atlanta, Atlanta to Accra, Ghana. Macy, is Accra your final destination?” the woman behind the Delta desk asks. My identity and travel plans couldn’t be clearer; I would be spending the next 18 months with Project Fives Alive! (PFA) in Tamale using Quality improvement (QI) methods to help improve their referral systems for pregnant women and critically ill children. After supporting the Project from the IHI headquarters in Cambridge, MA, USA for the last two years, I was thrilled by the opportunity to step away from the office and leave my comfy chair, reliable power and internet and start working face-to-face with the real maternal and neonatal health (MNH) challenges in Ghana.

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Excited to reunite in person with colleagues, who up to this point had mainly been virtual, and meet the newly hired team members, I found myself adjusting on many fronts to some tremendous differences.from my pale January skin, to my rapid American accent, to my novice fufu-eating skills, to my glowing blue (IHI) computer. However, despite these differences, the team made me feel right at home by taking the time to teach me how to eat properly with my hands (even tell me what I was eating sometimes), introduce me to some critical slang words, and practice shaking hands ending with a snap. Fully embracing these key learnings that would be my cultural foundation for the next year and half, my greatest and most unavoidable difference was my name, Lauren Macy. I couldn’t learn to make that Ghanaian. People I was meeting for the first time never could seem to get it.

I would always need to repeat it and explain that it started with an “L.” Some would finally be able to say it verbally but then type it into their mobile phones phonetically. The “Lauren” seemed more difficult than the “Macy” which I can thank Lionel Messi for. An Argentinian football (soccer) superstar, Messi is close enough to Macy that many Ghanaians have asked if we are related! Knowing that “Lauren” was difficult enough for some of my own colleagues to pronounce, I asked about the possibility of a nickname. Ghanaians have many names each with a specific purpose to reveal someone’s religion, gender, where they are from, if they share a lineage with the chief, and even what day of the week they were born. Because I didn’t have a hometown, lineage, etc. In Ghana, I opted for a day name.

I was born on a Sunday (Father’s Day, in fact). As quickly as I asked, Lauren was out and Akosua--the Twi name for a girl born on a Sunday--was in. Eighteen weeks later, I’m using Akosua more than Lauren.

Every week now I’m meeting new groups of people as we prepare for the launch of the Project. These introductions are crucial as we engage stakeholders, build will, and lay the groundwork for our future work together. Meetings have ranged from high level administrators - the Regional Health Director of Northern Region, and Nanumba North District Health Directorate - to a combined communities and health staff in Assin Breku, Central Region. Instead of getting the normal blank stare back after saying, “Hello! My name is Lauren Macy, I work with PFA in Tamale.” I now say “My name is Akosua Macy” and in return get a huge smile, sometimes a laugh or a clap, and a clear understanding and a sense of acceptance from the group.

They know how to spell that! The Queen Mother, who functions as a female community leader similar to a chief, in Assin Breku even said, “Now she knows how to introduce herself properly.” Akosua has brought me greater acceptance among the Ghanaian people, but I think most of all, it’s given me a way to connect. I’ve had young women selling fruit on the roadside want to know my name and tell me they are also Akosua, immediately we have a bond. This is not something I could have anticipated or planned for back in Cambridge.

In fact, I was just getting used to Lauren Macy since I changed my surname from Hayden to Macy after getting married about two years ago. Adapting an idea to your setting and testing a change suggested by those who know the context best, is what we do in QI. Who knew my first PDSA Cycle would be with my name? This test has certainly been a adopted and continues to bring even more joy to my work and daily life here in Tamale.

In finance, a foreign exchange option (commonly shortened to just FX option or currency option) is a derivative financial instrument that gives the right but not the obligation to exchange money denominated in one currency into another currency at a pre-agreed exchange rate on a specified date.[1] See Foreign exchange derivative. The foreign exchange options market is the deepest, largest and most liquid market for options of any kind. Most trading is over the counter (OTC) and is lightly regulated, but a fraction is traded on exchanges like the International Securities Exchange, Philadelphia Stock Exchange, or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for options on futures contracts. The global market for exchange-traded currency options was notionally valued by the Bank for International Settlements at $158.3 trillion in 2005 For example, a GBPUSD contract could give the owner the right to sell?1,000,000 and buy $2,000,000 on December 31. In this case the pre-agreed exchange rate, or strike price, is 2.0000 USD per GBP (or GBP/USD 2.00 as it is typically quoted) and the notional amounts (notionals) are?1,000,000 and $2,000,000. This type of contract is both a call on dollars and a put on sterling, and is typically called a GBPUSD put, as it is a put on the exchange rate; although it could equally be called a USDGBP call. If the rate is lower than 2.0000 on December 31 (say 1.9000), meaning that the dollar is stronger and the pound is weaker, then the option is exercised, allowing the owner to sell GBP at 2.0000 and immediately buy it back in the spot market at 1.9000, making a profit of (2.0000 GBPUSD?

1.9000 GBPUSD)? 1,000,000 GBP = 100,000 USD in the process. If instead they take the profit in GBP (by selling the USD on the spot market) this amounts to 100,000 / 1.9000 = 52,632 GBP. Although FX options are more widely used today than ever before, few multinationals act as if they truly understand when and why these instruments can add to shareholder value. To the contrary, much of the time corporates seem to use FX options to paper over accounting problems, or to disguise the true cost of speculative positioning, or sometimes to solve internal control problems.

The standard clich? About currency options affirms without elaboration their power to provide a company with upside potential while limiting the downside risk. Options are typically portrayed as a form of financial insurance, no less useful than property and casualty insurance. This glossy rationale masks the reality: if it is insurance then a currency option is akin to buying theft insurance to protect against flood risk. The truth is that the range of truly non-speculative uses for currency options, arising from the normal operations of a company, is quite small.

In reality currency options do provide excellent vehicles for corporates' speculative positioning in the guise of hedging. Corporates would go better if they didn't believe the disguise was real. Let's start with six of the most common myths about the benefits of FX options to the international corporation -- myths that damage shareholder values. Historically, the currency derivative pricing literature and the macroeconomics literature on FX determination have progressed separately. In this Chapter I argue the joint study of these two strands of literature and give an overview of FX option pricing concepts and terminology crucial for this interdisciplinary study. I also explain the three sources of information about market expectations and perception of risk that can be extracted from FX option prices and review empirical methods for extracting option-implied densities of future exchange rates. As an illustration, I conclude the Chapter by investigating time series dynamics of option-implied measures of FX risk vis-a-vis market events and US government policy actions during the period January 2007 to December 2008.

Chapter 2: This Chapter proposes using foreign exchange (FX) options with different strike prices and maturities to capture both FX expectations and risks. We show that exchange rate movements, which are notoriously difficult to model empirically, are well-explained by the term structures of forward premia and options-based measures of FX expectations and risk.

Although this finding is to be expected, expectations and risk have been largely ignored in empirical exchange rate modeling. Using daily options data for six major currency pairs, we first show that the cross section options-implied standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis consistently explain not only the conditional mean but also the entire conditional distribution of subsequent currency excess returns for horizons ranging from one week to twelve months. At June 30 and September 30, the value of the portfolio was?1,050,000. Note, however, that the notional amount of Ridgeway's hedging instrument was only?1,000,000. Therefore, subsequent to the increase in the value of the pound (which is assumed to have occurred on June 30), a portion of Ridgeway's foreign currency exchange risk was not hedged. For the three-month period ending September 30, exchange rates caused the value of the portfolio to decline by $52,500. Of that amount, only $50,000 was offset by changes in the value of the currency put option.

The difference between those amounts ($2,500) represents the exchange rate loss on the unhedged portion of the portfolio (i.e., the 'additional'?50,000 of fair value that arose through increased share prices after entering into the currency hedge). At June 30, the additional?50,000 of stock value had a U.S. Dollar fair value of $45,000. At September 30, using the spot rate of 0.85:1, the fair value of this additional portion of the portfolio declined to $42,500.

Ridge way will exclude from its assessment of hedge effectiveness the portion of the fair value of the put option attributable to time value. That is, Ridgeway will recognize changes in that portion of the put option's fair value in earnings but will not consider those changes to represent ineffectiveness.

Aitan Goelman, the CFTC’s Director of Enforcement, stated: “The setting of a benchmark rate is not simply another opportunity for banks to earn a profit. Countless individuals and companies around the world rely on these rates to settle financial contracts, and this reliance is premised on faith in the fundamental integrity of these benchmarks. The market only works if people have confidence that the process of setting these benchmarks is fair, not corrupted by manipulation by some of the biggest banks in the world.” The Commission finalized rules to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act regarding Regulation of Off-Exchange Retail Foreign Exchange Transactions and Intermediaries. The Commission also finalized Conforming Changes to existing Retail Foreign Exchange Regulations in response to the Dodd-Frank Act. Murder By Death Bitter Drink Bitter Moon Download Blogspot Template.

Florida Driver License Miami Beach. Additional information regarding these final rules is provided below, including rules, factsheets, and details of meetings held between CFTC Staff and outside parties.