Recent stock market turmoil and disappointing July jobs numbers have put many commentators back on recession watch. And some have asserted that the Fed’s been too tentative about lowering interest rates. Austan Goolsbee, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, spoke with CFO Brew about the likelihood of a recession, how recent events might affect the Fed’s calculus, and where CFOs fit into the whole picture.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What would you want CFOs in particular to know about the current state of the economy?

To the extent that the CFOs are thinking about financing…I would reiterate, the Fed takes a long arc of view. Daily gyrations of the stock market are not the thing that drives that action on the economy itself.

This is an unusual recovery. That might not be surprising because it was an extremely unusual downturn that was not driven by cyclical industries, and it was accompanied with a major shift of what consumers were spending their money on, out of services and into physical goods. And so part of what makes this a difficult moment to diagnose…is that you’ve got a bunch of cross currents that people have never seen before that are themselves unwinding at the same time that…consumer spending is shifting back to services.

For more insight from Goolsbee, click here.—CV

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We always look to Amazon. In our personal lives, it’s for dish soap, toilet paper, and Season 2 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

And in our professional lives here at CFO Brew, it’s for a general pulse check on the state of the economy and consumer spending, because that’s how big Amazon is.

The status report: Basically fine-ish, but there could be trouble ahead.

In Q2, total sales came in at $148 billion, jumping 10% year over year. Net income, meanwhile, came in at $13.5 billion. Investors also pay attention to Amazon’s numbers for its advertising segment—a key profit generator—and Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit.

Advertising brought in $12.8 billion, a slight miss from the $13 billion analysts expected, per StreetAccount data CNBC cited. On the other hand, revenue for Amazon Web Services came in at $26.3 billion, a 19% climb from last year.

Looking ahead, things get murkier. Amazon projected revenue for the current quarter to be between $154 billion and $158.5 billion. Analysts forecast $158.4 billion, per Bloomberg data.

Personally, we liked how the New York Times chose to describe what’s happening here, with a particularly pithy headline: “Amazon Cautions That When the News Gets Nutty, People Shop Less.”

To keep reading, click here.—NP

Massive airline interruptions, blue screens of death in Times Square, and widespread service outages at businesses—the glitch that crashed countless millions of machines from enterprise security firm CrowdStrike beginning on July 19 has likely run up a staggering bill in direct and indirect costs.

But while CrowdStrike identified the root cause as a bug in a quality control system within hours—and it claims the vast majority of client machines now are back online—the timeline for who pays for damages is likely in months or years.

A hazy timeline. Taz Koujalgi, a managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities who specializes in the enterprise software sector, told IT Brew the outage was “way wider than anything we have seen,” with total losses, though unknown exactly, in the billions of dollars.

“I don’t think anyone has a good answer on the number, and who’s going to pay for that number,” Koujalgi said.

According to Koujalgi, the first clear indicator of whether or not CrowdStrike expects to pay a considerable amount in damages may be its upcoming Q2 2025 financial report on August 28, as execs will likely “adjust the cash flow guidance to account for the damage they have to pay.”

To continue reading IT Brew’s story on who pays for damages in the Crowdstrike outage, click here.—TM

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