CEOs Growing More Confident

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Money Stack ImageThere is a growing confidence among Chief Executive Officers.  A report by Chief Executive magazine noted that there is another strong resurgence in May from responses by top executives.  The reading for May came in up 9% to 75.7.  There are no estimates for this number, but that is a gain of 48% from the lows seen in just February.

The Business Conditions Index is a measurement of confidence in business conditions, and it made the biggest gain of over 22% to 68.3.  That is an 83% recovery from the lows.

The Current Confidence Index came in at 69.6, a gain of 2.7 points from 66.9 in April.  The Future Confidence Index came in at 79.8, up 9.6 points form 70.2 in April.  There was also a gain in the Invest Confidence Index to 100.4 versus a reading of 99.4 in April.

CEOs must be closer to hiring again.  The Employment Confidence Index used to calculate overall confidence in the job market rose by 10% to nearly 52 points in May.  That is a recovery of about 58%.

The readership of this publication is still solid, as it reaches 42,000 chief executive officers and their peers.  The total reach is a readership of 220,000.  This is another feather in the cap for the green shoots crowd.  Hell, you can argue that this might even be a bloom.

Having confident CEO’s is not the only recipe for a recovery.  But there is a definite truth in the opposite: How aggressive can a company be and how solid will a company (and industry) be when CEO’s running the companies have little confidence in the economy?

The FULL REPORT can be found here.

Jon C. Ogg
June 4, 2009

Photo of 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.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618