Duke, CFO study: CFOs foresee more job cuts, credit woes - Business Courier of Cincinnati:

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The quarterly Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Busines s Outlook Surveyasked 1,309 CFOs worldwide about their expectations for the Their answers paint a gloomy picturwe for the rest of the year. * CFOs in the U.S. and Europee expected employment to shrinkby 5.5 percent, with the unemployment rate in the U.S. seen risin to perhaps as high as 12 percent in the next 12 Employment in Asia is expected to recedeby 1.
2 “Presumably, government programs will offset some of these losses, but even the most optimistivc government forecasts would reduce the losses by only 2 said Campbell Harvey, founding directofr of the survey and international business professor at Duke’sw Fuqua School of “We’re facing the possibility of another 4 million lost * U.S. and European CFOs foresee capita spending plunging by more than 10 In Asia, CFOs anticipate a 3 percenyt decline. * Six in 10 U.S. companiesz covered by the survety reported having trouble findintg credit or acquiring credit at areasonable rate.
Amongb those firms encounteringcredit impediments, 42 percent say the credit marketsx have gotten worse this year, while 23 percent say conditionzs have improved. * Weak consumerf demand and the credit markets ranked as the top two external concernsamong U.S. chiefr financial officers, with the federal government’s policies coming in Among internal concerns, CFOs are losinf the most sleep over theidr inability to plan due to economic managingtheir companies’ capital and liquidity, and maintaininf employee morale.
Despite all the negatived indicators, a majority of the CFOs in the Unitedf States and Asia reported beingt more optimistic this quarter than they were the previous That was not the case in where only 30 percent of the CFOs said they were more compared to the 31 percent who said they wereless “Our survey carries an important message: Don’t put too much weight on the data like consumer Recovery requires sustained confidence, and such confidencr is forged by stronger economic fundamentals,” Harvey said. “The economic fundamentalss –- employment, capital spending, the cost of credit – are stilkl fundamentally troubling.
” To see the complete survey go to the officialWeb .