In a special edition of Board Agenda’s Macro Memo podcast, exploring how companies are adjusting to the new trading landscape, Mark Kennedy, business adviser and Forvis Mazars partner, said firms would start planning for various scenarios, including recession.

Corporate leaders will conserve cash, strengthen their balance sheets and bolster liquidity while ensuring alternative funding sources are in place. They will also seek to ensure their top talent is protected.

“Many businesses will start to think about how resilient they are in the face of a number of scenarios,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy’s commentary comes after announcements on 2 April—dubbed by president Donald Trump as “liberation day”—that the White House would raise tariffs, to varying rates, for 90 countries exporting their goods to the US.

Chaos followed on markets with equity prices falling, the dollar dropping in value and the yield on US treasury bonds rising sharply, likely as a result of wholesale selling by bondholders such as Canada and Japan.

That caused the White House to retreat, reducing all tariffs to 10% for the next 90 days, though tariffs on goods from China were maintained at 145%.

Policy on Chinese exports changed yet again over the weekend when smartphones and laptops were given a special dispensation, though it appears this may be a short-term measure.

The consensus view among economists is that the tariffs will prove inflationary in the US, which may have knock-on effect for other economies around the world.

Chinese exports

Meanwhile, George Lagarias, chief economist at Forvis Mazars, says Europe and the UK may experience deflationary pressures as Chinese goods facing high US tariffs seek to find alternative markets at lower prices.

Lagarias said it would be “extremely wrong to mistake being resilient for being static”.

He suggested businesses could consider searching for new territories in which to trade and potentially reconfigure supply chains.

“Being resilient does not mean doing nothing,” said Lagarias. “It means battening down the hatches and it means keeping an eye out for new opportunities.”

Despite geopolitical and economic volatility, Kennedy believes morale among chief executives may still be high. A survey for the Forvis Mazars C-Suite Barometer conducted in January, as the White House leadership was changing hands, found 93% of business leaders remained “positive”.

“Part of the reason that positive stance is there,” said Kennedy, “is because you have a generation of business leaders that have been through a lot of uncertainty in the last ten years and they’re pretty good at managing it.”

Tune in to the latest episode of The Macro Memo podcast for analysis and expert insight about the impact of upcoming events on business and the economy, in partnership with Forvis Mazars.