president’s public criticisms of Goldman Sachs and Intel BOSSES have deep impacts
Most of our readers will be very familiar with having a vocal investor, activist or otherwise, take pot-shots at senior management figures.
But I’ll wager that not everyone has had to field a complaint in a public forum from one of the leaders of the free world. That is, of course, until Donald Trump started his second term.
Last week, it was microchip maker Intel and its CEO Lip-Bu Tan who were in the crosshairs. This week, it’s Goldman Sachs and its CEO – and part-time DJ, as Trump reminded us – David Solomon who are catching flak from the president.
Situations like this stand quite some distance outside of the usual corporate playbook. But, for IR teams and their governance colleagues, recent developments mean they must start thinking about their potential responses.
Most recently Trump, apparently speaking about a Goldman report from the weekend that suggested that his tariff policies were denting labor markets, stoking inflation and slowing economic growth, said that Solomon should ‘go out and get himself a new Economist’ because the bank made a ‘bad prediction a long time ago’.
It’s the latest in the president’s long-running battles with US company executives: last week, it was calling on Tan to resign over business ties to China; before that, it was Trump telling off Detroit carmakers for considering raising prices; and Walmart, Coca-Cola and any company with perceived ties to the Democrat Party have been targeted.
Those statements have often led to significant market movements: for example, in the case of Intel, shares dropped 3.1 percent the same week of Trump’s criticism, before jumping 5.62 percent this week on news that the company would meet with the president. That was accompanied by Intel putting out a statement praising the president’s ‘strong leadership’ and committing to working with him and the US administration.
While in-house teams have been tight-lipped – who could blame them? – I’ve seen many external advisors ask the question of What can companies to do respond? on social media and further afield.
One of these – Douglas Chia, formerly corporate secretary at Johnson & Johnson and now president of consultancy Soundboard Governance – put it very aptly.
‘Attempts by this POTUS to treat all corporations like state-owned enterprises is something I’m sure your CEOs and boards are aware of,’ he wrote on LinkedIn.
‘I’m not one to panic over every crisis of the moment, but this is something your media relations department might want to think about creating a standby statement for, especially the mega-cap companies, or companies that are in the… actually every company.’
As with the uncertainty surrounding tariffs, companies have yet another extreme scenario to plan for and contend with. As Lynn Antipas Tyson, executive director of IR at Ford, said on that topic: ‘I can’t predict – all we can do is prepare’.
What do you make of Trump’s latest outbursts against CEOs? Are you making any preparations for similar scenarios? Let us know, either via LinkedIn, or email us on [email protected].
