Dive Brief:

• The outlook among CEOs brightened this quarter, shifting from cautious to confident optimism and hitting the highest level in three years, the Conference Board said Thursday.
• “The improvement in CEO confidence in the first quarter of 2025 was significant and broad-based,” Stephanie Guichard, the Conference Board’s senior economist for global indicators, said in a statement. “CEOs were substantially more optimistic about current economic conditions as well as about future” prospects, she said.
• The share of chief executives during the current quarter planning to boost capital spending in the next 12 months surged 8 percentage points to 33%, according to the Conference Board which, with the Business Council, conducted the quarterly survey of 134 CEOs from Jan. 27 to Feb. 10.

Dive Insight:

CEOs and CFOs have grown more confident this year even amid a lack of clarity in federal regulation, trade, immigration and taxation under the Trump administration.

“Very simply, uncertainty is up across the board,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said in a report released Thursday.

“Gauges of uncertainty climbed steeply late last year,” Bostic said, highlighting gains in a Fed index of ambiguity in trade policy.

“Banks with high exposure to sectors facing intense trade uncertainty could pull back from lending, with negative effects for firms that depend on bank loans,” Bostic warned.

Moreover, business executives voice concern that the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations could crimp the supply of labor, especially in home construction and leisure and hospitality, he said.

“The situations are quite fluid, changing sometimes hour by hour,” Bostic said, referring to the outlook for federal policies. “So it’s impossible to say with certainty how any new approach might influence decisions and economic outcomes.”

The Conference Board survey results align with a report by the National Federation of Independent Business, which found in a survey that the mood among small businesses owners reflected what Bostic calls “pervasive ambiguity.”

“Small business owners greeted the new year with a surge in optimism,” the NFIB said this month, describing the results of a January survey.

Seventeen percent of small business owners believe the current period is a good time for substantial expansion, an increase from just 4% a few months ago, according to NFIB.

At the same time, “job creation plans are below the levels seen the last time the economy experienced solid growth,” the NFIB said, noting that the portion of small businesses last month that reported hiring or trying to hire workers fell 3 percentage points to 52%.

Moreover, an index measuring prospects for the U.S. economy fell last month, “reversing most of the gains from the previous two months,” Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, the Conference Board’s senior manager for Business Cycle Indicators, said Thursday in a statement.

“Consumers’ assessments of future business conditions turned more pessimistic in January, which — alongside fewer weekly hours worked in manufacturing — drove the monthly decline” in the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index, she said.

Still, in another sign of the mixed outlook, CEOs this quarter said they see many business risks receding, Business Council Vice Chair Roger Ferguson said Thursday.

“Compared to Q4 2024, fewer CEOs ranked cyber threats, regulatory uncertainty, financial and economic risks, and supply chain disruptions as high-impact risks,” Ferguson said in a statement.

“The one exception was geopolitical instability, which 55% of CEOs in Q1 saw as a high-impact risk to their industry — up from 52% last quarter,” he said.