The U.S. economy just finished a difficult month. It was so cold that consumers stayed indoors and didn’t make purchases, and the snow interrupted deliveries of products and supplies. Basically, everyone just called it quits and sat on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate for a couple of weeks, and the economic consequences were about what you’d expect.
The Institute for Supply Management in Tempe, Ariz. monitors manufacturing activity with a monthly survey. The institute announced today that its factory index had fallen to 51.3 percent. That number means that while factory orders did increase in January, they did not increase nearly as much as they did in December, or as much as analysts had hoped.
“We have experienced many late deliveries during the past week due to the weather shutting down truck lines,” was one factory’s response to the survey.
The report’s authors believe that manufacturing activity will resume its prior pace as the weather improves. Yet investors don’t share that optimism: the Dow Jones has fallen more than 1 percent this morning.
Whether or not the wobbly polar vortex that sent Arctic air our way last month is a result of global warming is still a matter of speculation. That said, the changing climate is going to make economic disruptions due to weather more frequent in the decades to come. From snow on the roads to shallow rivers, bad weather can cost real people real money in all kinds of unexpected ways.
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Read more: http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/02/03/why-is-the-stock-market-down-blame-the-polar-vortex/
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