How optimism fuels the economy

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SUZANNE CLARK: Did you see what just happened in the pandemic? Did you see how we came together? Do you see what’s happening in the economy?  

And yet you have politicians in both parties just bashing business all the time. 

What’s at stake for our country is: are we going to preserve a messy flawed system that’s the best system in the world and keep making it better? Are we going to acknowledge what the free enterprise system has done because we have so much more it still has to solve.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Suzanne Clark. The CEO of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, Suzanne advocates for businesses before global leaders, and here in the U.S. At a moment of global conflict, adversarial politics, big tech lawsuits, I wanted to take the temperature of the state of our economy with someone who represents millions of anxious business people. I was eager to ask Clark about her recent visit to China and also explore the impact of U.S. government regulation on progress and innovation. I’m Bob Safian. And this is Rapid Response. 

[THEME MUSIC]

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Suzanne Clark, the CEO of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Suzanne, thanks for joining us.

CLARK: Well, thanks for having me.

Copy LinkOptimistic or pessimistic about the state of American business?

SAFIAN: So you started the year talking about the state of American business and emphasizing optimism.

So now we’re three months in, stock market is way up. Are you just as optimistic? Are you more optimistic? 

CLARK: Look, I think the state of American business is almost always optimistic, right? Its core level. You don’t say start a podcast if you don’t think anyone’s going to listen to it. You don’t flip the sign to open on your coffee shop if you don’t think someone’s going to come in, right? 

I mean, it’s all an act of optimism. And so almost every business person I meet is optimistic about their chances, right? About their business. At the same time, to your point, as the year wears on, they have their own concerns. 

SAFIAN: Many everyday Americans seem much less enthusiastic than sometimes the numbers we see from CEOs, right? Do you have a sense of what that disconnect is about?

CLARK: Well, first of all, I think it’s fair, right? There are people out there that are really suffering, that feel left behind, that see rent prices or housing shortages or costs at the grocery store and are having a real impact on their lives. And so I think we have to admit that that’s happening and that there’s work still to do to help more people be lifted up.

Slowing the rate of inflation is not the same thing as prices going down overnight. Right. 

And I do think the housing shortage is underreported. When we talk to state and local chambers across the country, it’s become their number one issue. 

SAFIAN: But it’s strange, right? If your consumers and your customers are anxious that you, as a business leader, would be like, yeah, things are great.

CLARK: Well, you know, it’s interesting. We’re just out of the field with this quarterly poll we do with MetLife. 65% of small businesses said they feel really good about the health of their business. 65%. That same group of people, only 32 percent of them felt good about the health of the overall economy.

Right. So you have these small business people in communities saying, I feel good. I can serve my customers. I can serve my employees. I feel good about my business, but boy, I don’t know what’s going on out there. Right. So I think there are just two stories out there.

SAFIAN: I know you’re a former small business owner yourself. The chamber represents small businesses and big businesses. Is there a difference in what you hear right now from bigger businesses versus smaller businesses? 

CLARK: Oddly. No, to me, it’s a little bit of a myth that they’re that different. Their concerns are alike. Worker shortage, wage inflation, supply chain concerns.

You know, you hear the geopolitical uncertainty. You hear the same concerns, no matter what the size of the business is.

Copy LinkHow geopolitical uncertainty is impacting business

SAFIAN: The geopolitical uncertainty that you mentioned, that seems to be something worrying U.S. CEOs. Is that something you’re hearing a lot about as well? 

CLARK: Absolutely. You know, we have about 80 people who work full-time internationally, and so we are lucky to have a lot of experts and to host a lot of heads of state. We’ve got the Prime Minister of Japan coming in next week.

Remember how important it is, again, for small businesses to be able to export to a lot of these countries. So both our small guys and our big guys are really interested. in the global market. And when suddenly there’s war in Europe, war in the Middle East, Houthis blowing up ships. So suddenly, you know, we’ve got ships going around the Cape of Good Horn and taking an extra two weeks on the supply chain.

It does two things really: specific concerns, and just uncertainty, right? And what is capital hate more than uncertainty? 

Copy LinkSuzanne Clark on her trip to China

SAFIAN: You’re a kind of diplomat for American business globally. As you mentioned, you talk with prime ministers and chancellors, and notably you made a trip to China earlier this year, something that a stream of other U.S. executives and leaders are now doing.

Why did you make that trip? What did you learn?

CLARK: We went to China for a couple of reasons. While there are really important red lines, around national security and trade that should not happen with China.

There’s always this green lane of just normal trade that will happen between two huge economies.

Part of the reason for my trip was to work on the yellow area, to talk to China about intellectual property theft, to talk about what it feels like to American companies doing business there as the state secrets rules are coming out and, and how hard it can be to do discovery there and due diligence there in order to have M&A activity.

And so what are the places where they want more foreign direct investment, but American companies can find it hard and uncertain to do business there? But I’ll tell you the main reason for my trip is it’s really important that our two countries are in the habit of communication. After President Xi and President Biden met in San Francisco, we resumed military-to-military communications.

If you think for a minute how scary it is that that didn’t exist. You know, that we were two 24-year-olds in airplanes making a mistake away from an incident with no way for leadership to talk to each other was a really dangerous place. So the fact that we’ve re-established military-to-military communications, that business communities are talking, that there’s any kind of commercial working groups to work through some of these irritants, is really important between these two countries. 

SAFIAN: You met with Chinese leaders, with the premier. What was the feeling of the meeting? 

CLARK: The thing that has been interesting to me in this job, as I’ve traveled the world and met with heads of state, is how almost exactly alike it is no matter where you are.

You’re almost always brought into a waiting room of some sort. And then you go into a grander room, and you sit in a big, fluffy chair that exactly matches the head of state’s chair, and there’s a little table in between you, and then your delegation sit in straight back chairs along the side.

I have done this. In every country that you can imagine, they’re almost always exactly alike, and when we’ve hosted heads of state here, my team will set up a very similar setup. The book I’m going to write sometime is about how funny it is to be female and do this because I’m usually too small for the chair.

So you end up perching on the end of a chair trying to look important and have executive posture and yet you’re like tilted on the end of a chair awkwardly. Well, you know, usually male head of state is able to really own his space. You know, you’re just perched awkwardly on the end. But the set-up is almost always exactly the same.

We did meet with the premier. We did it in the great hall of the people — it is as grand as you would imagine that to be, beautiful murals and chandeliers and a very senior ranking delegation on the side, and a pretty frank conversation about the uncertainty in both of our economies and what that means.

You know, that the Chinese believe that we really are decoupling, not de-risking, despite the administration and Secretary Armando doing a good job of saying that’s not true, and we really believe that their regulatory uncertainty and their business climate uncertainty is making it riskier and more expensive to do business there.

SAFIAN: And, the mood, the tenor of the conversation is pretty clear. It’s not opaque. I mean, you don’t have that much time, so you don’t want to take too long, but at the same time, there are certain niceties and risks around being too blunt.

CLARK: Well, there are also risks of not being blunt, you know. I mean, it’s not good for an American of any sort, with any sort of official duty to go over there and not be blunt and not take hard news. Right? So it was a really important part of our trip to go over and talk about the real challenges.

What’s interesting about tone and tenor when you’re in a country where they have consecutive translation is that you spend a fair amount of time hearing tone and watching body language before you understand the words, and so that can be pretty interesting, thinking, wow, there’s a lot of emotion behind whatever he’s saying. And then you have to wait a beat to find out what those words were, and some of that emotion was around, I think, the Chinese feeling that we’re calling everything national security, you know. We had just come out with the decision about cranes, and they were saying, see, you’re saying everything is national security, and I think Americans believe, well, that one is, so, you know, I think there is some real debate between the two countries.

Copy LinkSuzanne Clark on the Biden administration’s “unprecedented regulatory overreach”

SAFIAN: So back here at home, I know your organization’s focus overall is on the free enterprise system. One of your colleagues used the phrase to me about, “unprecedented micromanagement by the U.S. government.” I wanted to ask you about how you feel about that and what you mean by that. I mean, there’s a regulation. There’s an FTC blocking JetBlue’s merger. There’s a Department of Justice action against Apple. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth, because this came from one of your colleagues, but is there a challenge that you see in the way the free enterprise system is operating in the U.S. relative to the U.S. government right now?

CLARK: I think what’s happening in the Biden administration is regulatory overreach that feels unprecedented to us.

It’s possible that the business community has used those words so many times over the years that it feels like we’re crying wolf when we say it again, but this time we think there’s a real wolf. And so the concern that we have is, first of all, that we’re not setting priorities well, right? So the decision, if we want, if we’ve decided that we need to move the country to EVs, then we’re going to have to prioritize mining.

And we’re going to have to prioritize restoring the electric grid. But if we’re not going to have mining, and we’re not going to invest in an electrical grid, but we’re going to make people buy cars and trucks that they can’t charge, that’s not strategic. That’s not a strategic plan. 

So, so often what we hear from businesses who, by the way, want clean air, want clean water, would like safe food, you know, are all for good regulation. They want an effective government that does only what it’s supposed to do and does it well. And one of the problems with a government that’s doing too much is that it’s frequently not doing the things that only it could do.

I think something we don’t talk about enough is all of the regulation and black box at the FTC that the slowing of M&A activity. It’s easy to think, oh, that’s good, that’s good. It’s gonna keep people from getting too big. But the sad part of that story is the small guy just missed his exit, right?

The big guy can survive without buying that small guy, it can wait through the cycle, but the small guy could have just missed their exit right when interest rates were going up, right? So I think there’s some pain still out there.

I mean, to give you an example, we did a study of the S&P 500. We looked at their 10 Ks over 10 years, watched, and categorized what they were naming as their biggest risk.

And across a decade, the mentions of public policy risk went up almost 30%. That means that American companies are filing that the biggest escalating risk is coming from their own government. That’s really startling.

SAFIAN: I mean, I guess there are two ways I can interpret that. Some is about, sort of, guardrails that the government might be putting on there. But some of those policy risks might also be about the political uncertainty and instability as our country has become more polarized. And, a change of administration in the White House is just such a dramatic shift that that kind of uncertainty becomes very difficult for businesses to plan and operate. 

CLARK: Aren’t they related, right? Because if 10 of the last 12 elections have been swing elections, that means that government policy goes guardrail to guardrail every 2 to 4 years. So, you know, you’re an expert, you talk to people all the time, you know a business that only has a 2-year plan, an 18-month plan?

Copy Link“Our allies are concerned about the uncertainty in the United States”

SAFIAN: I mean, but those guardrails have become so much farther apart, too. I guess like I know you’re talking to people, you’re talking to people abroad, you know politically in the U.S. it’s like there’s talk that this presidential election is the most monumental ever, do you hear that from leaders when you’re talking to them abroad?

CLARK: Unfortunately, our allies are concerned about uncertainty in the United States, you know, and I think it should be disheartening to Americans to think that our allies look at us and say, what’s happening over there? I don’t get it right? And what we hear from our adversaries is we love it.

Like, the more uncertainty, the better.

What I hear from CEOs, I think privately, they’re getting really tired of the oxymoronic world they live in, where the Edelman trust barometer will say business is the only institution that still has any trust. And yet you have politicians in both parties just bashing business all the time.

Right. And I think these CEOs are like: Did you see what just happened in the pandemic? Did you see how we came together? Do you see what’s happening in the economy? With 2 or 2.3 million more job openings, then people looking for work, right? That means everybody who has a job wants a job. Maybe it’s not the job they want.

Maybe they have a higher aspiration, but business is doing a lot of good out there, and I think getting tired of being beaten up about it by people who just want to score political points.

SAFIAN: Clark makes a good point. As we get closer to the November election, we’re likely to hear more skewering of big business. But it’s important to acknowledge the positive impact that businesses have made, particularly in the last four years. 

After the break, Clark reveals why she thinks it’s harmful for employees to bring their whole selves to work, and why the professional expectations put onto young people today can be suffocating. We’ll be right back. 

Before the break, CEO of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, Suzanne Clark, talked about optimism and anxiety among U.S. business leaders. Now, she challenges the notion of bringing your full self to work, and encourages us all to rethink our priorities. Let’s jump back in. 

SAFIAN: I want to ask you in the private conversations I’ve had with business leaders, one of the things I’m hearing is a sort of heightened uneasiness about addressing certain kinds of social and cultural issues. In a short time, they’ve gone from feeling like they need to take a stand on everything to now being fearful about taking a stand on anything, right? Whether that’s diversity in DEI or climate in ESG or Israel and Gaza, what are you hearing from leaders about that kind of challenge, and how do you advise them to think about it?

CLARK: Look, I think first of all, remember that book Bowling Alone? The idea that people were still going to bowl, but not in leagues, it’s really come true, right? People aren’t joining churches and synagogues the way that they used to.

You know, my grandfather was an elk and in the rotary and, you know, people just aren’t doing those things the way that they used to. And so they come to work, and that might be the community that they have. And what we see is then people want to act out their whole selves in this community, in this one place.

And my personal view is that we have to tell people you can’t, right? We’re a 50-50 country. You think you know what the person in the next cubicle thinks, or the next Zoom box, but you might be wrong, right? And so, how do we evolve to a place where we can respect that people want to be community activists or political activists and give them time or space to do that, but help evolve to a place where you can’t bring all of your pieces to work and have it be the only outlet for that. 

SAFIAN: So I’ve been doing this to you in this chat. You’re often asked, like, how do CEOs and businesses feel about this or about that? Is there a topic that you’re surprised that you’re not getting questions about that you think you should or wish you should?

CLARK: I do think that we are not as a country prioritizing very well. You know, it’s not clear to me why we can’t say, we need to fix these three things. Yes, there’s a list of 100. We’re going to fix these three things. And when they’re on their way, we’ll get to four, five, and six, right? We’re at a place as a country where we think we can do all of the things at the same time, and it just doesn’t work.

And so I’m confused maybe as a human about strategic prioritization that we all understand in our own homes, in our own budgets, in our own businesses, but that we don’t expect our leaders to fulfill in any way, right?

Copy LinkSuzanne Clark on the big U.S. tech companies

SAFIAN: It’s just, it’s so interesting listening to you because when you read the newspaper, watch TV, the challenges that we hear about business are business creating them by them being too big or them abusing their power. And what you’re saying in a lot of ways is that the biggest challenges that business is facing is that the government is not creating an appropriately fertile landscape for those businesses to build the future that we want to have.

CLARK: I think the market takes care of things that get too big. The number of companies that are in the Fortune 500 today that were there in the 80s is much smaller than the average citizen believes it is.

It’s a more fluid situation than I think people realize. And, the idea that, you know, you still need the government to step in on a real monopoly, sure. I mean, there’s fair government regulation and, and fairness matters, and competition matters. But when every merger is bad and anything big is bad, well, that’s ridiculous too. 

SAFIAN: I’ve thought about how the folks at JetBlue must feel like we would be too big if we were part of Spirit, we still won’t be as big as the folks we’re competing against, you know, or as Apple says to the department of justice, like you say, we dominate the U.S. market.

We’re playing in an international market, and we don’t dominate that. And like, you know, these are complicated and difficult questions. Obviously.

CLARK: If you look at our big tech companies, it’s the one thing our adversaries cannot beat us at. They have not been able to figure it out, right? So if you think about the wars of the future and how they can be fought over tech and tech infrastructure and how that’s going to work, they’ve got to be laughing at us that the one thing they can’t figure out how to mimic or build or defeat, we’re talking about taking down on our own out of a system of fairness, right?

Like, what is the strategic priority here? 

Copy LinkHow the cadence of change in the U.S. has accelerated

SAFIAN: You were first at the U. S. Chamber from 1997 to 2007, then you left for a while before coming back. The challenges you faced back then, Iraq War, Dot Com bubble, does any of that feel familiar today?

What’s different about what you see now, and what’s different about what the Chamber does now?

CLARK: The difference to me feels like cadence, and pace and scale. If you say inflation is at a 40-year high, you’re definitionally saying that no one in leadership has ever experienced inflation like this.

But we don’t think about it in that human term. So if you think about the same time, no one in leadership had ever experienced a global pandemic. Nobody had ever experienced those supply chain disruptions. No one had ever experienced inflation like this. 

And so I think that is what’s different. Cadence of change, pace of change, and the, and the drama of the past couple of years.

SAFIAN: Well, and I guess in that context, when you are a business leader and you are running a business, you may feel like you have a different kind of responsibility. Like people are looking to you for things that maybe weren’t the purview of a business person in the same way that they are today.

CLARK: At the end of the day, you have to be a competent executive for your employees and your customers and your shareholders and your investors. And that has to be the most important service that you can provide, but increasingly to do those things, you’re called on in a leadership way that nobody else ever was.

You know, my grandfather came out of World War II in the Navy, used his GI Bill to buy his in-laws a house, never went to college, got a job — got a great job — and supported his family for decades. 

And if you asked him what his purpose was, first of all, he would have laughed at you, but second of all, he would have said, “I took care of my family, I took care of my community.” And now we say to these young people, we got to do that. You got to take care of your family. You got to take care of your community, but you got to have a mission, and you got to have a purpose and you have to have, like somehow we’ve gotten away from taking care of your family, taking care of your community.

As a life’s purpose, you have to also save the whales or something. You know, you have to do all of those things while having this other purpose. And I just think these young people today, they’re so hard on themselves. And I try to tell them business can be a great calling that allows you to be philanthropic, that allows you to create opportunities for other people, that allows you to solve problems.

SAFIAN: You know, it reminds me of what you were saying before about prioritization overall. I think as individuals, we do the same thing. The world is so interconnected that we feel like we have responsibility for all kinds of things. But as you say, you can’t necessarily have an impact on everything. 

CLARK: It ends where we started, right? Which is, it’s why in however long, whatever period of time I have this job, it can’t be about the individual fight for an individual business or an individual fight for an individual industry. It’s got to be about promoting and defending the whole system.

Are we going to preserve a messy flawed system that’s the best system in the world and keep making it better? Are we going to acknowledge what the free enterprise system has done because we have so much more it still has to solve, right?

Educational opportunities for more people, housing for more people, healthcare for more people. That’s gonna be solved through innovation and technology and business, right? So what’s at stake is us losing respect for and interest in and passion for the very job creators and problem solvers that can help us get through this complicated time.

SAFIAN: Suzanne, thank you so much for doing this.

CLARK: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

SAFIAN: Since talking with Clark, I’ve been thinking about the idea of “purpose” and the pressure I put on myself to do more than just take care of my family. It’s a balance, right? I don’t want to be insular and selfish, and wider issues do impact my family’s future, the larger community. I suppose what I’m after, like a lot of ambitious, business-minded folk, is to have a healthy mix — to take care of my own but also recognize the privileges that I have, and to apply some of that toward helping others. I hope this podcast is a reflection of that larger goal, and that you find it helpful as you try to navigate that balance too. 

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.