Wall Street CEOs are cycling through the five stages of tariff grief

Wall Street is getting more and more worried about the potential loss of America’s superpower status. Now its CEOs are cycling from denial and bargaining to public anger and depression.

Since President Trump started unveiling his chaotic tariffs this spring, sparking waves of panic among global investors, the country’s business leaders have been facing massive — and unrelenting — uncertainty.

The ongoing tariff tug-of-war is already hiking prices for both consumers and businesses, while fraying some of the country’s international relationships. Meanwhile, executives and investors are also eyeing the surging national deficit, which will be worsened by the president’s proposed budget. The massive bill has already passed the House and is being considered by the Senate.

Now many of the most powerful business leaders in America are warning that the country’s global financial standing is at risk.

“We have to get our act together. We have to do it very quickly,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the Reagan National Economic Forum last month.

Dimon said he’s specifically worried about the power of the U.S. dollar — which has been the world’s dominant currency since the end of World War II. Almost 60% of foreign-exchange currency reserves held by central banks around the world are in dollars.

“I always get asked this question, ‘Are we going to be the reserve currency?’ No!” Dimon said at the conference. “If we are not the pre-eminent military and the pre-eminent economy in 40 years, we will not be the reserve currency.”

Dimon and the other executives who run the country’s banks wield a vast amount of power over our financial system. They’re usually among the first to see what’s happening in our economy. And this spring, they’ve been going through a process perhaps best described as “the five stages of tariff grief.”

CEOs started out in denial about tariffs

Anyone who’s endured a significant loss may be familiar with Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s model for processing death and dying. She described a cycle of five emotions: Denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.

Since President Trump took office again in January, Corporate America’s top leaders seem to have cycled through them all.

Many started out in denial. Back in February, soon after Trump had first announced and then first delayed some new tariffs, the Conference Board surveyed the heads of the largest U.S. companies. The business-focused nonprofit found that CEO confidence was actually at a three-year high.

“They are not thinking so much about tariffs. They are thinking about deregulation [and] lower taxes,” Stephanie Guichard, senior economist at the Conference Board, told NPR at the time.

Now CEOs are thinking a lot more about tariffs. Their confidence has plummeted in the last three months, the Conference Board reported in late May. It was the worst quarter-over-quarter dropoff since the organization started tracking it, 49 years ago.

“Shame on the administration.” 

In recent weeks, some Wall Street leaders seem to have moved on to anger and depression.

“The administration’s attempts to use tariffs comes at a dear price to the U.S. economy and … to the U.S. consumer, who will undoubtedly face higher prices in their day-to-day life because of these actions,” billionaire investor Ken Griffin, a Republican donor and Trump supporter as recently as December, told a Forbes conference last week.

Griffin, founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, also rebuked the president for lashing out at Walmart, after the retailer’s CEO warned investors that it would have to raise prices as a result of the tariffs.

“We should not criticize CEOs for being honest, right? And that’s all the CEO of Walmart was doing,” Griffin said. “Shame on the administration.”

White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an emailed statement to NPR that Trump’s budget bill will “further turbocharge America’s economic resurgence.”

“Despite endless doomsday predictions about President Trump’s tariffs, economic indicators have continued to improve,” he added.

Wall Street hopes the White House will do more bargaining on trade deals

Griffin’s comments reflect a lot of the emotional roller-coaster that Wall Street executives — and the rest of the country — are on, when it comes to figuring out what’s going to happen to the U.S. economy.

Some CEOs are trying to call for more bargaining, especially with China. Dimon, for example, recently warned the United States against continuing to escalate its trade war with one of its largest trading partners.

“I would engage with China,” he told the Reagan conference in late May, adding that he’d just returned from a trip to the country. “They’re not scared, folks.”

Administration officials are currently doing just that: Officials from the U.S. and China are currently in London for a new round of trade negotiations.

But many questions remain about the final shape — and costs — of the taxes that the United States has now added to virtually all imports.

“We do have a lot to lose.”

Some on Wall Street are warning that the United States might need to practice acceptance of an economic downturn.

For example, Goldman Sachs currently predicts that the U.S. has a 35% chance of falling into a recession in the next year. That’s an improved outlook from April, when Trump’s initial tariffs plans sent global markets into a tailspin and led Goldman’s predicted recession risk to spike to 45%.

But as Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius told a conference hosted by his bank last month, “35[%] is still a sizable number. And I think a lot of it is around the fact that…the president loves tariffs.”

Many leaders on Wall Street and throughout Corporate America have been cautious about criticizing President Trump too directly, in part due to fears of stoking Walmart-style public retribution from the White House.

But as Griffin’s comments demonstrate, even some of his allies are increasingly worried about how his policies could affect the United States’ economic outlook — and its longtime global superpower status.

TCW chief executive Katie Koch, for example, recently pointed out that the United States accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population — but accounts for 25% of its gross domestic product, and 70% of global stock markets.

“There’s this narrative that we need to embark on these policies because somehow we were losing,” she said at a conference hosted by the Milken Institute last month.

As Koch warned, “We’ve done a lot of winning already — and we do have a lot to lose.”