Dow Jones Risk Journal noted Monday: hot-button firms could face subpoenas; firms that did direct business with Trump or worked on high-profile executive projects were expected to face scrutiny
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal last week, HPE CEO Antonio Neri said nothing would change for HPE because the company had to speak to both sides of the aisle. Erle Norton asked Neri what he thought would change after the election, and Neri answered: “The reality is that we have to speak to both sides of the aisle all the time. …So for us, nothing changes.”
In a separate interview last week, Columbia Business School professor Glenn Hubbard said he was not sure things would be too different for chief executives, effectively echoing Neri’s no-change view. Norton and Lila MacLellan spoke with Hubbard, a former economic adviser to George W. Bush, for the Journal. Hubbard added that policy gridlock was likely to continue.
Hubbard said many chief executives could need time to determine how to proceed if different people were in charge in either house of Congress than in the White House. He framed the concern as one about process rather than policy: “For many CEOs, figuring out where to go will take a while. If there’s different folks in charge in either house of Congress than in the White House, it means power is diffuse, and that’s concerning for CEOs. Not concerning in the policy sense, just concerning in the process sense. How do I operate?”
Even so, Hubbard said chief executives could see a potential roadmap from bills Congress passes, even if Trump uses his veto power. Recalling his time at the Treasury Department during George H.W. Bush’s administration, Hubbard said Democrats passed bills that Bush vetoed. Those bills offered insight into what the next Democratic administration would do.
“If I were CEO, I’d say, ‘well, they’re trying to pass bills that look like this. That means if they had the White House, that’s what they’d try to do,’” Hubbard said.
Norton wrote that with Democrats taking over both chambers of Congress in January, there was an inclination to portray a vastly different landscape for chief executives. He wrote that there would most certainly be changes, chief among them possible Democratic investigations under their new oversight powers. Citing Journal colleagues, Norton wrote that if Sen. Elizabeth Warren became Senate Banking Committee chair, she would likely “haul in many chief executives for hearings.”
Dow Jones Risk Journal noted Monday that “companies in hot-button sectors—cryptocurrency, financial services, artificial intelligence and others—could face subpoenas. Companies that have directly done business with Trump or worked on high-profile executive projects, such as the new White House ballroom, are also expected to face scrutiny.”
Norton reported that Democrats who won the governor’s races in Georgia and Texas, two hotspots for data center projects, have called for temporary data center construction bans.
Norton wrote: “But in some ways, January may look a lot like yesterday.” The Journal wrote that antitrust enforcement would remain in the hands of the administration, so Wall Street still sees the rush of deals continuing.
In cybersecurity, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla offered a different forecast. Speaking at WSJ Tech: California last night, Khosla told the audience: “The next four or five years will be totally chaotic in cyber.” During an interview with Sarah Krouse, technology and media editor, Khosla also said: “The good news is everybody should be investing in lots of cyber.”
The CEO Council Summit in San Francisco is scheduled for December 7–8.
CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from the WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.