On June 24, 2026 The CFO Survey was released. It contains a variety of statistics regarding how CFOs view business and economic conditions.
In the CFO Survey press release, I found the following to be the most notable excerpts – although I don’t necessarily agree with them:
Financial decision-makers’ outlooks worsened this quarter amid heightened concern over rising costs and prices, according to the CFO Survey, a collaboration of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta. The survey, which included 530 respondents, was fielded from May 18 to June 5, 2026.
Since the last survey, CFOs added 1.1 percentage points to their firm’s unit cost and price growth projections for 2026. Financial executives also lowered their expectations for real GDP growth over the next four quarters to 1.8 percent, from 2.1 percent in the prior survey.
The CFO Survey contains an Optimism Index chart, with the blue line showing U.S. Optimism (with regard to the economy) at 60.6, as seen below:
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It should be interesting to see how well the CFOs predict business and economic conditions going forward. I discussed past various aspects of this, and the importance of these predictions, in the July 9, 2010 post titled “The Business Environment”.
(past posts on CEO and CFO surveys can be found under the “CFO and CEO Confidence” tag)
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I post various economic forecasts because I believe they should be carefully monitored. However, as those familiar with this site are aware, I do not necessarily agree with many of the consensus estimates and much of the commentary in these forecast surveys.
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The Special Note summarizes my overall thoughts about our economic situation
SPX at 7406.87 as this post is written