Are Tariff Worries Cutting into Business Investment?

“Nobody’s model does a very good job of how uncertainty and hits to confidence affect behavior,” says Deutsche Bank’s Peter Hooper in a recent Wall Street Journal article. Count us as sympathetic to his viewpoint. That’s one reason why a few of us at the Atlanta Fed created a national survey of firms in collaboration with Nick Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) elicits information about each firm’s expectations and uncertainty regarding its own future capital expenditures, sales growth, employment, and costs. Read more here.