24/7 Wall St.

There 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