Wall Street is panic-selling over President Trump's chaotic new tariffs. Business executives are reportedly making frantic calls to the White House. And on Tuesday, the country's top CEOs crowded into a closed-door meeting with Trump — setting a record for attendance.
Yet in public, corporate America's leaders are remaining calm — and even upbeat.
"The business community understands what the president is trying to do with tariffs," Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told Fox Business Network on Wednesday.
Solomon acknowledged that companies "always" want lower tariffs. But he was also careful to start his comments by praising Trump for being "engaged with the business community" — unlike, he added, the Biden administration.
The Goldman Sachs CEO was speaking a day after Trump met with him and other members of the Business Roundtable, an influential CEO group. The meeting followed two days of sharp losses in the U.S. stock market, in a $4 trillion (and ongoing) selloff, largely kindled by Trump's words and actions: Since early March, Trump has implemented a flurry of steep new tariffs, reversed some of them, and shrugged off concerns over their economic impact.
When asked about the possibility of a recession, Trump demurred — in a reply that sparked this week's market turmoil.
"There is a period of transition, because what we're doing is very big. We're bringing wealth back to America," the president told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday.
By mid-week, a handful of the most powerful CEOs had started to express concern — but even then, only in very mild terms.
"Uncertainty is not a good thing," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who runs the country's largest bank, said Wednesday at a conference hosted by the publication Semafor.
And Larry Fink, who runs investment giant BlackRock, told CNN that "the economy is weakening as we speak."
Yet Fink was also quick to add that the Trump administration's policies "can be very productive for the United States" in the long run.
A White House spokesperson on Thursday reiterated his statement to NPR from earlier this week.
"President
Trump delivered historic job, wage, and investment growth in his first
term, and is set to do so again in his second term," White House
spokesperson Kush Desai said by email.
Why America's business leaders engage in delicate diplomacy
Corporate America's careful rhetoric — even as many big companies brace for the impact of the market volatility and the tariffs — illustrates the delicate diplomacy that business leaders are trying to engage in. They largely welcome Trump's other economic promises — including lower taxes and fewer regulations.
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