Corporate leaders don't want to hire or invest
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Actual business activity — sales, employment, and so on — is holding up just fine for now. But a profound worry about the future has settled in among America's corporate leaders, making them reluctant to invest or hire.
The big picture: That picture of corporate paralysis comes through in the latest Beige Book, in which Fed officials try to discern what's happening beneath the surface of the U.S. economy by calling up businesspeople and asking them.
- It points to a risk that, even if March and April data suggest economic stability — and it has so far — corporate behavior is shifting in ways creating high odds of a downturn later in the year.
- At turning points in the economy, anecdotal compilations like the Fed's eight-times-a-year Beige Book can be good guides to how things are changing in ways that haven't yet shown up in the data.
State of play: The report's top-line summaries of current conditions sound perfectly fine. "Economic activity was little changed since the previous report," it says. "Employment was little changed to up slightly" in most of the country.
- It's one layer down that the signs of trouble emerge. When it comes to future planning, the trade war is creating profound uncertainty that looks to already be translating into restrained hiring and capital spending.
- Contacts in several Fed districts "reported that firms were taking a wait-and-see approach to employment, pausing or slowing hiring until there is more clarity on economic conditions," the report said, along with "scattered reports of firms preparing for layoffs."
- "Business leaders indicated recent strategy discussions shifted away from capital investments aimed at innovation and efficiency toward a focus almost entirely on mitigating tariff-related risks," reported the Kansas City Fed.
By the numbers: The document used the word "uncertainty" 80 times, up from 45 times in the early March edition and 11 times a year ago.
- In the edition released in April 2020 — the early days of the pandemic — the word appeared only 19 times. In October of 2008, during the free fall phase of the global financial crisis, 16 times.
- In other words, by this (admittedly imperfect) measure, businesspeople are more unsure of what lies ahead than they were even in some of the most traumatic moments in modern economic history.
Of note: There are many mentions of trouble in the tourism business. The Boston Fed, for example, reported that "travel from Canada declined noticeably, and contacts feared that summer travel from Europe and China could suffer as well because of negative reactions to U.S. tariff policies."
