The Conference Board issued a special C-Suite Outlook midyear survey of 750 CEOs and other C-suite executives. The survey focused on the impacts of the Ukraine War conflict on the global business environment. More than 60% of the survey participants expect a recession in their geographic region in the next 12 to 18 months. An additional 15% think the region of the world where their company operates is already in a recession. The war’s impact appears far-reaching.
Just a few months ago, in late 2021, only 22% of CEOs surveyed have been seeing recession risk. The Ukraine War is contributing to inflation through energy price volatility and higher costs for scarce inputs. This is leading to concerns over margin compression. Moreover, the surveyed executives fear that US-China tensions have a major impact on business operations in the coming 12 months. They have serious concerns about the emergence of competing economic blocs.
Higher energy prices are a particular concern, some executives say, with rising transportation costs making it more expensive to produce goods. The fallout of the Ukraine War, supply-chain challenges, and Covid-19 lockdowns in China, not to mention rising interest rates, are all “creating some uncertainty in terms of the outlook,” said Paul Knopp, chair and CEO of accounting and advisory firm KPMG U.S.
Veteran investor and bitcoin bull Michael Novogratz shares the recession fears. “The economy is going to collapse,” Novogratz told MarketWatch. “We are going to go into a really fast recession, and you can see that in lots of ways,” he said.
