The rampant optimism felt in the C-suite immediately after the election has been replaced by gloom, according to a new survey.
A poll of more than 220 U.S. CEOs finds business confidence at its lowest level since November 2012 — and recession fears on the rise.
After a double-digit surge in optimism in the months following the November presidential election, confidence among America’s business community fell sharply the first week of March, according to Chief Executive’s latest CEO Confidence Index, fielded March 4 and 5.
“I expected some kind of dip in confidence, but the extent was surprising. It was surprising to see it dip this low this suddenly,” Melanie Nolen, head of research at Chief Executive Group, told Quartz.
Nolen said that typically the confidence index isn’t very volatile month to month, so the results were unusual.
“When we last polled them in mid-January they were highly optimistic that we were going into a recovery. The optimism was really high,” Nolen said. And then the tariffs happened.
CEOs have a “comments” section where they can share open-ended insights and concerns, and Nolen said that almost all the respondents cited tariffs and trade as reasons for their sudden gloom. Government layoffs were also mentioned, but not as frequently as tariffs.
CEOs’ rating of current business conditions in the U.S. fell 20 percent from January, from 6.3 to 5 out of 10, on a scale where 1 is Poor and 10 is Excellent. This is the lowest level since the spring of 2020, when the pandemic shut down businesses around the world. Nolen said the CEO nadir was the spring of 2009 when it hit 1.4.
Overall, only 39 percent of the more than 220 CEOs surveyed now believe the business climate will improve this year, down 13 percentage points (or 25 percent) from 52 percent at the start of the year. Instead, 36 percent say they expect things will get worse, up from 20 percent in January (note: a survey was not conducted in February 2025).
CEOs’ forecast for what those conditions will look like 12 months from now fell by an even greater margin — 28 percent — from 7/10 in January to 5/10 in March. The last time CEOs’ outlook hit that low was November 2012.
Nolen says that the CEOs in the survey represent a mix of industries but are highly concentrated in manufacturing, finance, health care, and technology.
Nolen says time will tell whether the CEOs’ mood brightens. Surveys in the coming months will establish whether this past month was an outlier or a trend.
“We forecast that as long as there is uncertainty we will see some volatility n the confidence index, as long as there is no clarity in what is happening, I expect that number to be low. Right now it is not the actions of the Trump administration, it is the uncertainty,” Nolen says.