US companies are trying to understand how to respond to Donald Trump’s trade war, concerned about the influence of the president’s tariffs on the economy, but careful to speak out of fear of revenge from the White House, according to board leaders and members.
Corporate leaders are not sure how far away to rebuild their businesses in response to Wednesday’s tariffs, in doubt about how long Trump will adhere to his current course and hopes that they will lobby it to ease some of the policies.
Complicating matters are a climate of fear created by the latest target of the White House legal firms, including Paul Weiss.
“You don’t want to be a dog that bark for everyone else because you will be the one who will be shot,” said one person who runs the board of an American company.
Another executive on a corporate board said the best approach was to make the Trump issue and his team privately so that these policies could harm its essential ingredients through higher prices and job losses.
“It will be lobbying velvet gloves to his most thoughtful and clearly involved politics advisers,” another executive on an American board, referring to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Disney Bob Iger’s chief executive expressed concern Thursday at an internal editorial meeting on ABC News, according to the people who heard remarks.
He said it would not be easy for US companies to shift their production to the country due to specialized work forces and various borders. Iger mentioned the example of Apple Foxconn objects in China, where the technology giant makes most of its equipment.
Iger also warned that Disney itself will be affected. With steel prices that can rise, the costs of the company for the construction of cruise ships would increase, he said.
Trump Blitz’s fee and China’s revenge destroyed the goods markets, making the raw prices be elected at low three -year levels of $ 65.58 on Friday, with oil traders betting that the US administration has no immediate plan to return trade punitive measures.
On Friday Magnati Shale Harold Hamm, executive chairman of the continental resources, told Financial Times that he remained a supporter of Trump and his efforts to make fundamental reforms and rebuild US production handling unfair trade practices abroad.
“But it is also true that you cannot train, children, training if you produce oil and gas below the cost of supply. Clay manufacturers hope that current market turbulence is a temporary situation so they can give the president’s agenda to release US energy predominance,” said Hamm, who is also the chief executive of the industry manufacturers.
A private capital executive at one of the largest industry firms said that many companies had analyzed and gameed out of tariffs to see their impact on their lower lines and developed solutions to prepare for “ERITION Liberation” when the tariffs were announced.
But that preliminary work was thrown out because the formula that the White House used to calculate the tariffs came nowhere near people’s expectations.
A number of investment firms have or are planning to describe their views on tariffs for clients, many of whom are investors abroad who were shocked by the scope and direction of taxes.
Carlyle Group on Monday will host a call “Special Global Investment Environment” with the best investors, in which co -founder David Rubenstein and two other executives are expected to describe a book to deal with fees.
Some corporate leaders appealed for calm and did not deduct the possibility for the market to react.
“While it has been quite harsh and drastic, we all know that the shares have a tendency to react and underestimated,” said Herman Bulls, vice president in the JLL real estate commercial group and a board director in USAA, hotels, Fluers Energy and Comfort Systems.
“This is not a surprise in terms of direction,” Bulls said. “This was talked about during the campaign and when he won.”
The tariff announcement came between the “Round-up Round-up” conference organized in New York by JPMORgan Chase for executives, investors and analysts in the retail sector.
The main financial officer of Home Depot Richard McPhail was among the executives who indicated that there would now be potentially tense negotiations to shift the tariff burden on suppliers than US consumers.
“In the normal course, we always have conversations about the cost with our sellers,” he said. “When it comes to tariffs, this is just another cost in the equation that we need to understand mutually.”
Another retailer, guess, this week suggested that she could leave the suppliers in Asia in Latin America, where the announced tariffs tend to be more moderate.
But corporate advisers said there were many questions about US politics that companies were able to engage in large -scale adjustments.
“I think they will stop making big movements of the supply chain because this is not even the beginning of the end,” said Kristin Bohl, a customs specialist in PWC US.
“It’s not the end of the beginning. There is a lot of uncertainty for a CEO to decide that he or she will take operations abroad A and transfer them to B.”
Reporting by Joshua Franklin, Stephen Foley, Anna Nicolaou, Antoine Gara, Jamie Smyth, Patrick Temple-West and Claire Bushey
