CEOs of big-time companies are optimistic about next year after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last month, according to a new survey.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the new survey shows an uptick of CEOs being more upbeat about 2025 due to top executives believing they will “benefit from lower corporate taxes and less regulation” as a result of Trump’s election, according to the report.
The survey, conducted by advisory firm Teneo and based on responses from 300 public-company CEOs, found that 77 percent of chief executives think the global economy will improve in the first half of 2025. This is a 32-point increase from the 45 percent of CEOs who thought the same going into 2024, according to the report.
The survey also found that CEOs of larger companies are less likely to say that Trump’s proposed tariffs will have a “positive impact” on their business, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Just 13 percent of CEOs of large companies said the tariffs will have a positive impact, compared to 80 percent of CEOs of smaller companies who said the same, according to WSJ.
Paul Keary, the CEO of Teneo, also offered a rosy outlook for 2025 in a press release statement about the results.
“For the first time since Teneo has conducted this survey, we see significant alignment between CEOs and investors on the direction of the global economy, and confidence has never been higher,” Keary said.
“Buoyed by the ‘Trump Effect,’ the market expects a resurgence of M&A, increased hiring and greater levels of U.S. and foreign investment. The U.S. will clearly be the beneficiary of much of this positive activity, solidifying its position as the most important investment destination for global businesses,” he added.
The survey comes as CEOs are cozying up to Trump ahead of his second term, with tech companies pledging $1 million donations to the president-elect’s inauguration fund. This includes Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other tech moguls as well.
Trump touched on his rekindled relationships with big business executives in a press conference on Monday.
“In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” he said of business executives traveling to meet him.
While CEOs are offering a positive outlook, many economists have warned that Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported goods from Canada, Mexico and China could increase costs for Americans.
Even Trump said in a recent interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker that he could not “guarantee” that costs would not go up as a result.
“I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” he told Welker.
And a new Emerson College survey, released Tuesday, found that most Americans were wary on whether tariffs would help the U.S. economy more than hurt it.
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