‘We’re just hanging on for dear life’: How CEOs are navigating increasing geopolitical uncertainty.

We convened a group of CEOs yesterday, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, to share perspectives on how they’re managing differently. Nikolaus Lang, who heads the BCG Henderson Institute and chairs its Center for Geopolitics, notes that “companies need to build up a geopolitical muscle around talent, functions, and processes.”

That’s become even more of an imperative in recent weeks as U.S. Policy takes a new direction, with Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference providing “the clearest wakeup call,” says Lang, that old rules and alliances are no longer a given.

Here are edited highlights of what some of the CEOs had to say:

Marc Casper, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Government relations, in normal times, is a relatively modest use of time. Building relationships for the longer term is the way I’ve always thought about it. This has been a super active time. In the U.S., it’s largely been about educating the administration on the implications of some policies and, with Congress, it’s about what’s important fundamentally to U.S. Competitiveness. You can’t make changes until you know what’s likely to stick, so you reduce costs as appropriate. In a regulated industry, you cannot do things particularly quickly.

Christiana Riley, Santander U.S. We are the eurozone’s largest bank by market cap and amongst the largest consumer banks globally, representing 173 million customers across the 12 markets. We’re going through a major investment cycle in building new digital banking capabilities. We continue to see opportunity, both in a hard-currency market such as the U.S. And in the higher-growth developing markets where we have leading franchises in Mexico and Brazil. But it’s been a real roller coaster operating in a global organization.

Arjun Sethi, Kraken and Chairman, Tribe Capital: It’s not about what the rules are going to be. It’s just that there are rules of the road that you can sort of adhere to, so that there’s market stability. But some regulatory clarity creates instability. For example, in our venture capital, public and private markets, we’ve just retreated 100% from Europe. And the U.K. Is on the cusp as to whether we’re going to deploy capital there or not. In Argentina, we retreated, but we’re still in Brazil. We’re still in India. We’re still in Israel. China, we’re still in but it’s sort of 50:50.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: With barriers to trade, the work that comes back is different from the work that left. Employers are rational. They need to compete on price and will automate to the highest degree possible. This accelerates the cooling of labor markets and it always flips the fastest in the U.S., which has fewer structural barriers to maintaining employment. Europe was struggling economically prior to this and this is just going to make it worse. From the Asia and Latin perspective, we’re seeing good growth. Work can move to talent today, and will be able to move much, much, easier in the future. We’re just at the beginning of this flow.

Matt Gline, Roivant Sciences: There was a meme a while ago about a cat that crawled on to the wing of an airplane. The cat was okay but there’s a video of the cat clinging to the wing until they managed to land the plane. We’re definitely the cat in that scenario. We’re just hanging on for dear life, waiting to see where it all goes.

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]

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The markets

• The S&P 500 fell 0.33% yesterday to 5,693.31 and is now down 3.20% YTD. Tech stocks were down even more. Reddit lost 8% on the day. Markets in China, Japan and Europe were all down this morning. S&P futures hinted at more pain to come: they were trading down 0.2% this morning premarket.

From the analysts

• WARC on global ad spend: “Growth forecasts for advertising spend have been downgraded this year (-0.9pp to +6.7%) and next (-0.7pp to +6.3%), equivalent to a $19.8bn cut,” per James McDonald.
• Wedbush on Gamestop’s Bitcoin plan: “GameStop is following the MicroStrategy playbook, but MicroStrategy currently trades at less than 2x the value of its Bitcoin holdings. With GameStop already trading at more than 2x its cash holdings it is unlikely that its conversion of cash into Bitcoin will drive an even greater premium,” per Michael Pachter et al.
• Goldman Sachs on gold: “We raise our end-2025 forecast to $3,300/toz (vs. $3,100) and our forecast range to $3,250-3,520, reflecting upside surprises in ETF inflows and in continued strong central bank gold demand,” per Lina Thomas and Daan Struyven.
• Wedbush on auto tariffs: “These initial tariffs (if they hold in their current form) would be a hurricane-like headwind to foreign (and many US) automakers and ultimately push the average price of cars up $5k to $10k depending on the make/model/price point. We continue to believe this is some form of negotiation, and these tariffs could change by the week, although this initial 25% tariff on autos from outside the US is almost an untenable head-scratching number for the US consumer,” per Daniel Ives et al.

Around the watercooler