Top CEO Poll: Fire People As Fast As Possible

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 8:28AM EDT · Published Apr 7, 9:55AM EDT

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The Business Roundtable is a small group of CEOs, but an elite one. Its members are chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $5 trillion in annual revenue and nearly 10 million employees. They comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock markets.

The most recent survey of the group, which looks at their outlook for the next six months, does not yield very optimistic results, particularly in the arena of job cuts.

When asked “How do you expect your company’s U.S. employment to change in the next six months?”, 71% said that they would cut people. To the question “How do you expect your company’s U.S. capital spending to change in the next six months?” 66% said that they plan to decrease spending.

The news is a strong indication that the largest, most well-capitalized companies in the US are still planning plenty of layoffs, and that means that the notion that the rate at which unemployment is growing is not likely to abate.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.