Former President Donald Trump will speak to a number of the world's strongest business leaders on Thursday, but with some notable absences.
In addition to Trump, President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients will speak to CEOs on Biden's behalf because the President is in Italy for the G7 meeting.
A spokeswoman for the Business Roundtable said it expected “approximately” 100 of the greater than 200 chief executives who belong to the exclusive forum to attend Thursday's quarterly meeting in Washington, describing that turnout as typical.
CNBC contacted each of the greater than 200 corporations whose CEOs are listed online as members of the Business Roundtable and asked in the event that they would love to attend Thursday's meeting.
Only 17 corporations confirmed whether the corporate's CEO was present or not. The rest – greater than 180 corporations – didn’t reply to emails for several days.
Here's what we all know: Of the 17 company spokespeople who responded to CNBC, 4 said their CEOs planned to attend: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Citigroup Managing Director Jane Fraser, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro.
Another 13 said their CEOs wouldn’t attend Trump and Zients' speeches.
Black Stone CEO and Trump ally Steve Schwarzman, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Steel housing CEO Sara Armbruster, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, delta Airline boss Ed Bastian, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick and Executive Chairman James Gorman in addition to Duke Energy According to company officials, CEO Lynn Good shall be amongst those that will miss the conference.
Some of them, comparable to Armbruster, Good and Solomon, should not participating as a result of scheduling conflicts and travel. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, for instance, will reportedly attend the G7 summit in Italy.
Representatives for Woods and Bastian didn’t reply to questions on why their CEOs is not going to attend the meeting. Representatives for Fink and Nadella didn’t reply to requests for comment.
The list of attendees on the meeting could read like an inventory of which CEOs are willing to travel to Washington to listen to Trump – and which should not – just weeks after his conviction in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s comments to the group could also provide a split-screen comparison with What Biden said in his speech to the CEOs at a Business Roundtable meeting in March 2022 during which he participated.
In his campaign, the president is citing his administration's aggressive antitrust enforcement and blanket ban on so-called junk fees that corporations charge for services that cost the corporate nothing.
This policy has drawn the ire of some business leaders, who at the moment are hoping for a second Trump administration and the associated loosening of regulations.
Behind closed doors, nevertheless, Biden has made his own efforts to woo the American economy. The president has met often with CEOs and industry executives to debate the U.S. economy's post-pandemic recovery and its global standing.
Republican former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California said the willingness of busy CEOs to travel to Washington for a face-to-face meeting with Trump was a results of the close presidential campaign.
“I find [CEOs] “I see what everyone else sees, which is that he's going to win,” McCarthy said Wednesday on CNBC's “Squawk Box.”
For some of the CEOs planning to attend Thursday, the decision to be there represents a shift in their attitude toward the former president. Following the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, several top executives have sharply broken with Trump, either publicly or privately.
Last year, Dimon urged attendees at the New York Times DealBook conference to “help” Trump’s rival, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, win her primary against Trump.
If Haley does well, Dimon said, voters may have “a selection on the Republican side that could be higher than Trump.” The former president responded by slamming Dimon on social media, calling him an “overrated globalist.”
But just two months later, Dimon changed his mind.
“Take a step back, be honest. [Trump] “He was right in some ways about NATO and immigration. He grew the economy quite well. The trade tax reform worked. He was partly right about China,” Dimon said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Trump has outlined an economic program for his second term that many economists believe could lead to a renewed rise in inflation – a feared prospect for investors and consumers who have spent the past year waiting impatiently for the Federal Reserve to respond to cooling inflation by cutting interest rates.
The former president has also proposed extending his first-term tax cuts beyond their expiration date in 2025 and imposing draconian import tariffs across the board, particularly on imports from China.
In his speech in Davos, Dimon suggested that he wanted to defend some of Trump's policies at least in part because he wanted to avoid a scenario in which either he or JPMorgan Chase would take on the notoriously vindictive Trump.
“I have to be prepared for both [Trump and Biden to win]he said. “I'll be prepared for each. We'll handle each.”
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