BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews recently visited the Swiss Re building, also known as the Gherkin, to attend a press briefing on weather derivatives. The briefing took place on the 14th floor, less than a third the way up the building, and below the inflection point at which the curvature tends inwards. Even at this vantage point, however, the views were fantastic. The 14th floor contains a spacious split-level café-bar area, where TUPNews spent a pleasant half hour chatting with other correspondents. After this, we were ushered into a sleek, well-appointed briefing room. The room was rectangular, with the seats arranged to face away from a long window and towards a podium. On the podium-side wall, there were two large, embedded flatscreen monitors. As we entered, these monitors showed a woman sitting behind a desk staring out at us. High-quality office environments induce a feeling of calm and serenity in TUPNews, and as a result I did not immediately compute why this image of the woman was being broadcast; it just seemed to fit with the ambience of the space. Soon after, however, the woman was introduced as the head of such-and-such, and it emerged that she was in fact addressing us from a purpose-built studio in Swiss Re’s New York offices. At the end of her address, people asked her questions, which she could hear through the microphones in the room, and she was able to respond. There was only the tiniest hint of satellite delay. TUPNews found this experience utterly sublime.

Weather derivatives are brilliant. In fact, they are my favourite financial instruments. As you can probably guess, they allow you to bet on the weather: temperature, rainfall, even wind. Mostly used by energy, agricultural and construction firms, but Joe Six-pack can access them as well, in Holland anyway. There, Dutch bank ABN Amro offers an internet savings account that will bump up its interest rate if it rains too much over the summer. This is what risk management should be about!