Bloomberg Businessweek (June 2025)

Год выпуска: June, 2025

Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek

Жанр: Бизнес

Издательство: «Bloomberg Businessweek»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 100

CEOs Are Already Feeling

Trump Fatigue

In April, as businesses across the US were starting to feel the weight of Donald Trump’s sudden, steep tariffs, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas asked Texas manufacturers to describe how things were going for their companies. The executives reported that factory activity had continued to rise and production showed modest growth. But the future was looking scary.

“The tariff issue is a mess, and we are now starting to see vendors passing along increases, which we will have to in turn pass along to our customers,” a printing industry executive told the Dallas Fed. An electronics maker was just as blunt: “We have already had to turn around and refuse shipments because customers cannot afford the tariffs, delaying our ability to build, which will eventually lead to job losses.”

The Dallas Fed’s monthly Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey is a widely followed barometer, because the state accounts for about 10% of US manufacturing—and because business owners there had enthusiastically embraced Trump, who won Texas by double digits in the 2024 election. Executives from 87 companies responded to the April survey, and overall they were a glum group. “Perceptions of broader business conditions continued to worsen notably,” the report found.

A few months ago, American business leaders were largely cheering Trump’s return to the White House and his promises of explosive growth. “Starting on Day 1 we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods,” he said during the campaign.

Postelection surveys of executives at companies large and small found business leaders preparing for what they believed would be an economic boom. Almost two-thirds of executives at midsize companies were optimistic about the prospects for the US economy in 2025, “an extraordinary shift in business sentiment,” according to a January report from JPMorgan Chase & Co. An influential monthly measure of CEO confidence from Chief Executive magazine also jumped after the election, with 82% expecting higher revenue in the coming year.

By April, that optimism had dried up, as Trump downplayed rising prices and instead announced punitive global tariffs that threaten to make just about everything Americans produce, buy or sell more expensive. Even if many CEOs were sitting silently or putting on a brave face in public, J.P. Morgan Research found “the uncertainty associated with tariff increases and the general thrust of the Trump administration’s policies are now depressing business sentiment, which will directly weigh on spending and hiring.” The Chief Executive confidence numbers deflated too, with 62% of CEOs in the survey saying they expected a slowdown or recession in the next six months.

“Basically, people voted for Donald Trump for four reasons,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “To bring down inflation. To juice the economy. To stop illegal immigration. And to get away from ‘woke’ culture. The evidence on the first two suggests that increasing prices and slower growth are what’s being produced by the tariffs—which is exactly the opposite of why people voted for him.” Trump declared success after the US and China agreed to temporarily pull back on tariffs for 90 days. But it’s not clear whether American businesses making decisions about the future will see that as a sign of renewed stability—or prolonged uncertainty.

If Trump is concerned that support for his economic policies might be crumbling, he isn’t letting it show. Instead, he’s pivoted in a way only Trump would do. The act of enduring rising prices from his tariffs has been recast as a patriotic duty. The picture he once painted of an instant golden age of America has given way to lectures on the virtue of rationing dolls for children—and, puzzlingly, pencils—as a way to force trading partners to come to the table on tariffs. “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls,” Trump said in an NBC News interview in May. “They can have three.”

That’s not likely to be a winning line, Ayres says, even if, as Trump points out, his supporters had to know he wanted tariffs. “Trump talked a lot about tariffs in the campaign, but people didn’t vote for an economic theory,” Ayres says. “People voted for an economic result.”

Remarks

• The CEO set sours on Trump

In Context

• Can the US economy survive without migrant workers?
• The repo man loves America’s pre-tariff car-buying frenzy
• Canada’s US boycott brings trouble to border towns
• Are we nearing a recession or not?
• South Korea is the new clear nuclear winner
• Climate-proofing Mumbai
• The Right Stuff: The best gear for your next trip
• ThriftCon is the Super Bowl of vintage clothes
• A Walk With: Chomps’ Rashid Ali, the meat-stick mogul

In View

• Tariffs will not lead to a manufacturing revival
• Trump plays the Grinch this Christmas
• The Fed must remain independent

AI

• We aren’t at Skynet yet … but whoa!
• How China’s DeepSeek got the jump on American AI
• An algal bloom of bots clogs the internet
• Satya Nadella searches for Microsoft’s place in the AI age
• AI is changing work—just ask the workers
• A visit to OpenAI’s massive data center in Texas
• First contact will probably be made by an algorithm
• Ones to Watch: The people shaping tomorrow’s tech

Clara Wu Tsai’s plan to make the WNBA Liberty the first $1 billion women’s sports team

Pursuits

• Building an all-American wine cellar in the time of tariffs
• Drivers, rejoice! High-fidelity sound finally hits the road
• CEO Diet: What execs listen to on the way to work
• The best books to distract (or instruct) this summer
• Meet the designer who first put women in separates
• Materialists puzzles through matchmaking math
• What you’ll want to watch and look at in June
• At long last, Nintendo is ready to Switch it up
• Our critic finds heaven in a Parisian supermarket
• The Caribbean is hotter than usual this summer

Last Thing

• This month’s puzzle: A ticker tape parade

скачать журнал: Bloomberg Businessweek (June 2025)