Business leaders’ quandaries under Trump
“Corporate leaders regularly praise the Trump administration and its policies in public. Behind closed doors, their mood is darker,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
“At a meeting of CEOs and other executives on Wednesday convened by the Yale School of Management, dozens of America’s business leaders sounded off on their concerns about tariffs, immigration, foreign policy matters and what many described as an increasingly chaotic, hard-to-navigate business environment,” the WSJ says.
“They’re being extorted and bullied individually, but in private discourse, they’re really upset,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who organized the event, referring to recent deals giving the U.S. government a cut of some Nvidia chip sales and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel.
The Associated Press reported earlier this month that “The American job market, a pillar of U.S. economic strength since the pandemic, is crumbling under the weight of President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies.
“Uncertain about where things are headed, companies have grown increasingly reluctant to hire, leaving agonized jobseekers unable to find work and weighing on consumers who account for 70 percent of all U.S. economic activity,” AP says.
Adding to business’ dilemma, “Wall Street banks and tech companies big and small were scrambling on Saturday to figure out how their tens of thousands of employees would be affected by President Trump’s proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee for visas granted to skilled foreign workers,” says The New York Times.