Assume you have just been hired as a financial analyst by Tennessee Sunshine Inc., a midsized Tennessee company that specializes in creating exotic sauces from imported fruits and vegetables. The firm’s CEO, Bill Stooksbury, recently returned from an industry corporate executive conference in San Francisco, and one of the sessions he attended was on the pressing need for smaller companies to institute corporate risk management programs. Since no one at Tennessee Sunshine is familiar with the basics of derivatives and corporate risk management, Stooksbury has asked you to prepare a brief report that the firm’s executives could use to gain at least a cursory understanding of the topics.
To begin, you gathered some outside materials on derivatives and corporate risk management and used these materials to draft a list of pertinent questions that need to be answered. In fact, one possible approach to the paper is to use a question-and-answer format. Now that the questions have been drafted, you have to develop the answers.
Why might stockholders be indifferent whether or not a firm reduces the volatility of its cash flows?