Tuesday, April 13, 2010

CEO Confidence

We've talked a lot recently about the consumer confidence outlook, but maybe more important than that is the CEO Outlook, sponsored by a group called the Business Roundtable. Consumers are guessing at where the economy is going, but CEOs are the ones actually calling the shots.

A CEO Outlook from the second half of March, released last week, shows a good deal of confidence on their part. Among the 105 CEOs polled, 73 percent expect sales to rise over the next six months, and almost 50 percent expect to do more capital spending in that time frame. Those numbers are up from 68 percent and 40 percent, respectively, in the fourth quarter of '09.

But only 29 percent of those CEOs expect to be hiring in the next six months, and 21 percent of them expect to lay off more workers. (Half expect no change in hiring.) Those are sad figures indeed for an economy that is supposed to be in the midst of a recovery. One more reason why unemployment is expected to persist at historically high levels even as the rest of the economy recovers.

No comments:

Post a Comment