Weathering The Business Climate

New financial and predicting tools help keep Mother Nature from raining on profits

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." --Hartford Courant, 1897

Once upon a time, many businesses blamed a convenient scapegoat whenever profits went south--Mother Nature. Too hot. Too cold. Too rainy. Too sunny. When your product didn't sell, your losses grew and you lost market share, it was easier to point the finger at meteorology than management. But those days are over. Thanks to a blossoming of private firms that make sense of weather data in business terms, and a new financial tool called a weather derivative, a variety of industries are using forecasts to fine-tune corporate...

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