Sep 9, 2026 · 8 min · 6 segments
The second half of 2026 is forcing executives to revisit assumptions they made just months ago. As leadership teams finalize their 2027 plans, inflation, supply-chain challenges and cost pressures…
Many of America's business leaders have reason to feel pretty good about things as they gather their teams to finalize 2027 plans.
Consumer demand is broadly holding up, even if some areas are showing strain.
Employees' wage increases continue to moderate, while their AI investments are, fingers crossed, starting to pay off.
And if they're playing any role at all in the data center boom, order books are full and then some.
But if you look closely, you can see frowns forming across more than a few foreheads.
And that's mostly because some old bugaboos have returned.
Recent reports from big-name consulting firms Graham Thornton and PricewaterhouseCoopers now showed that some executive leaders are being challenged this summer in ways they hadn't expected earlier this year.
The biggest culprits? Inflation and supply chain snarls.
Problems we all hoped had peaked earlier this decade, but that have flared up again in large part due to the war with Iran.
Grant Thornton's quarterly survey of hundreds of CFOs shows the group to be at its most pessimistic about the U.S. economy in five years.
Only 37 percent of executives, down from more than 45 percent in Q1, told the firm they are optimistic, while 40 percent are downbeat.
Supply chain pain is playing a big role in that sour mood.
The share of CFOs confident that they'll meet their supply chain needs in the near future fell to 43% from 58%, a drop that also lowered their confidence in achieving broader cost control goals.
Worth noting here, the Grant Thornton team conducted its poll while there was still relative calm on the tariff front.
accumulating last week in steep new tariffs from President Donald Trump and retaliatory actions from Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Tariff uncertainty is creating challenges with supply chains, and the oil supply and the war created a lot of economic uncertainty and pessimism that we've seen, said Dana Lance, leader of Grant Thornton's Tax Solutions Quality and Risk Group.
Another group of CFOs responded to the quarterly survey from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Richmond and Atlanta branches of the Federal Reserve in a similar way.
Early this year, their top concerns were trade, tariffs, labor, and general demand picture.
Three months later, labor is the only repeat topic and sitting at a distant third to inflation and non-labor costs.
As with the broad economic outlook CFOs gave Grant Thornton, those concerns have eaten into the growth outlook of executives who spoke with the Duke and Fed teams.
That's still nowhere near a recession, but slow enough to have some of those frowns start to show.
This continues to feel like the economy that could have been, said Greg Ducco, the chief economist at EY Parthenon, who wrote on August 26th, absent the strains from the global terrain conflict, tensions in the Middle East, and persistent policy uncertainty, the AI investment surge could well have supported steady growth above 3%.
Many of America's business leaders have reason to feel pretty good about things as they gather their teams to finalize 2027 plans.
Consumer demand is broadly holding up, even if some areas are showing strain.
Employees' wage increases continue to moderate, while their AI investments are, fingers crossed, starting to pay off.
And if they're playing any role at all in the data center boom, order books are full and then some.
But if you look closely, you can see frowns forming across more than a few foreheads.
And that's mostly because some old bugaboos have returned.
Recent reports from big-name consulting firms Graham Thornton and PricewaterhouseCoopers now showed that some executive leaders are being challenged this summer in ways they hadn't expected earlier this year.
The biggest culprits? Inflation and supply chain snarls.
Problems we all hoped had peaked earlier this decade, but that have flared up again in large part due to the war with Iran.
Grant Thornton's quarterly survey of hundreds of CFOs shows the group to be at its most pessimistic about the U.S. economy in five years.
Only 37 percent of executives, down from more than 45 percent in Q1, told the firm they are optimistic, while 40 percent are downbeat.
Supply chain pain is playing a big role in that sour mood.
The share of CFOs confident that they'll meet their supply chain needs in the near future fell to 43% from 58%, a drop that also lowered their confidence in achieving broader cost control goals.
Worth noting here, the Grant Thornton team conducted its poll while there was still relative calm on the tariff front.
accumulating last week in steep new tariffs from President Donald Trump and retaliatory actions from Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Tariff uncertainty is creating challenges with supply chains, and the oil supply and the war created a lot of economic uncertainty and pessimism that we've seen, said Dana Lance, leader of Grant Thornton's Tax Solutions Quality and Risk Group.
Another group of CFOs responded to the quarterly survey from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Richmond and Atlanta branches of the Federal Reserve in a similar way.
Early this year, their top concerns were trade, tariffs, labor, and general demand picture.
Three months later, labor is the only repeat topic and sitting at a distant third to inflation and non-labor costs.
As with the broad economic outlook CFOs gave Grant Thornton, those concerns have eaten into the growth outlook of executives who spoke with the Duke and Fed teams.
That's still nowhere near a recession, but slow enough to have some of those frowns start to show.
This continues to feel like the economy that could have been, said Greg Ducco, the chief economist at EY Parthenon, who wrote on August 26th, absent the strains from the global terrain conflict, tensions in the Middle East, and persistent policy uncertainty, the AI investment surge could well have supported steady growth above 3%.
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