Tariffs emerge as CFOs’ top concern

What a difference a quarter makes.

Last quarter, CFOs’ biggest concerns were talent, monetary policy, and inflation, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. This quarter, tariffs and trade policy are what’s keeping them up at night.

Tariffs emerged as the top concern of the CFOs from 400 firms who took the survey, followed by inflation and monetary policy. Around 25% of CFOs said they planned to decrease hiring in response to tariffs, and 25% also said they’d cut capital spending. Though half said they weren’t making any changes to suppliers due to tariffs, 27% were making plans to diversify suppliers and 20% were accelerating purchases.

Respondents who were concerned about tariffs “had notably lower optimism, lower expectations for GDP growth, lower expectations for revenue and employment growth, and higher expectations for price growth in 2025,” Sonya Ravindranath Waddell, VP and economist at the Richmond Fed, said in a press release.

CFOs’ optimism about the economy rose last quarter, partly due to the election, but slipped this quarter, falling from 66.0 to 62.1 on the Richmond Fed’s index. CFOs are still significantly more optimistic than they were in June 2022, when the index reached 50.5, its lowest point since 2011.

CFOs also reported feeling slightly more pessimistic about their companies’ prospects in the year ahead. And the buzzword of the moment—“uncertainty”—became a top-five concern for CFOs for the first time in the survey’s history.