By Peter Atwater

Dear S&P 500  CEOs,

With all due respect, as I read your earnings releases, your  analyst presentations, and your various op-ed pieces, I am afraid that you  really don’t understand what is happening around you.  The economic,  financial, business, political, and even cultural environment that brought you  and your organizations enormous financial success in the past is now seeming to  fight you at every turn -- and yet you still use words like “economic  uncertainty” to describe the current business environment  as if once we get through this current “economic uncertainty,” life will return  to the way things were.

What I am afraid you fail to appreciate is that  the confidence of the world around you -- the people you serve, the government  leaders you work with, the vendors you buy from, and many of your own employees  is far lower than your own and as a result how they see the world around them  and what they want is very different from you.  Worse, the transnational  businesses that you have built -- which rely on the unprecedented free mobility  of goods, labor, services, capital, and even data -- are woefully ill-suited to our current low level of social mood.

Since  you live in a world of endless PowerPoint presentations, let me give you a few  slides that may help you to see what I mean.

First, here is the gap  between what I measure as your own personal level of confidence and the  confidence of the world around you.



Given how heavily you are compensated in stock and options, you live in a  nominal world.  And in that nominal world, there has been an enormous  recovery since 2009.  For the rest of the world – most of your employees,  your clients, the folks in Washington, etc. -- as measured by the Bloomberg  Consumer Confidence Index, there has been no recovery.   Outside of  your small group, folks are currently experiencing their twelfth year of weak or  declining confidence.


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