What business leaders are saying days before the election
This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
Election Day is almost here.
And with that will come an end (hopefully!) to one of the most divisive runs for the presidency in American history (or at least in my time on Earth).
America’s biggest businesses and their well-connected C-suite leaders will begin to get clarity on everything from tariffs (watch what Brooks Running CEO Dan Sheridan said on this front) to mergers and acquisitions to tax policy. Wall Street strategists, economists, and traders will be able to be more definitive in their calls for investors.
“I think regardless of the outcome, having the election behind us, we will, I think, put everyone’s mind at ease, and we’ll be able to get back to work and focus on moving forward together as a country,” Marriott chairman David Marriott said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast. “You hope and pray every day that our political leaders in this country can find a way to work together and work on solutions for the country and not be so bifurcated as we have been.”
Investors will be able to move on as well, hopefully putting more stock in a company’s fundamentals than a Trump post on Truth Social or a Musk post on X, formerly Twitter.
In the meantime, like you, we await the conclusion here at Yahoo Finance. Except to say we will have some stellar reporting from our newsroom across live programming, our new podcasts, and digital articles on Election Day, the day after, and the entire week.
Yours truly will be live on the Opening Bid podcast from the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square with a great roundtable of guests on Wednesday morning, joined by my friends on the Capitol Gains podcast team. All that actionable investing insight kicks off at 8 a.m. ET on Yahoo Finance, YouTube, and major streaming platforms.
Our all-star live markets blog (found daily at the top of our homepage) will be up and running on Yahoo Finance around the clock on Election Day and right on into the next day. And we are coordinating with the Yahoo News team to provide relevant political and financial insights as results roll in on Election Day.
So use Yahoo Finance and the Yahoo ecosystem as your guide to business and markets in what will be a super busy week.
To that end, here’s what prominent names in the world of business have told me about potential tariffs and future regulation in the lead-up to Election Day.
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“The tariffs on China really affect, in our case, components that we’re bringing out of China in many cases that are still single country available in China. So many of our suppliers haven’t diversified geographically yet. They’re in the process of doing so in many cases. A lot of these tariffs [being floated by Trump] would apply to components that we would be bringing into the United States as an example, to actually complete manufacturing of a product in the United States.
“And so I think we have to be thoughtful, and hopefully whatever administration is in will be thoughtful about how, and be somewhat surgical about, where they choose to deploy tariffs. But we’re very much into creating pro-growth trade policies and I think that’s what’s really important to this country.”
“When you look at tariffs, I’m not sure we know how to express how that will impact the economy, because in some ways the whole idea is if people say now that something being imported it’s more expensive, they may choose not to buy it. Some of these assessments assume that everyone will just pay that higher price. But I think the idea is to say, unless someone’s a monopoly supplier and there are no alternatives of goods comparable being manufactured in our own country, then you have a different sort of a problem, possibly a national security problem.”
“I think for our industry, actually, it’s a huge headwind. And there’s a lot of reasons why, right? We’ve already got high tariffs on footwear out of China, it’s 27%-ish. Out of Vietnam, it’s about 20%. So an additional 20% or 25% or whatever — it’s huge. The conversation is massive. To absorb that as a business begins to take investment out of R&D, takes it out of consumer demand creation, takes it out of experiences. So we have to pass those on to the consumer. And you can’t pass a 25% lift in cost completely.”
“I think the first thing I would ground that conversation in is this [artificial intelligence] technology is incredibly important for humanity, and it will create a tremendous amount of opportunity and eventually, wealth for everybody. It’s a really powerful technology. We want to make sure as many people have access to it as possible. So I think we have to be very considerate in what the regulations are.
“And then the regulations that we would advocate for are around transparency. So for example, where are these models getting their data? What are the weights between the various data sources and how are they used? I think that’s the sort of thing that is really important for the broader public to know when engaging with any of these models.”
“At the end of the day, there are tariffs now in China. We have a limited amount of production in China, so anything else in China probably wouldn’t affect us much. But, overall, if there are tariffs, it’ll be a level playing field. So everybody will be affected, and we’ll deal with it the very best that we can. I’ve been through the tariff cycle before when I was at Logitech [as CEO], and it’s manageable and we’ll work through it.”
Three times each week, I field insight-filled conversations with the biggest names in business and markets on Opening Bid. Find more episodes on our video hub. Watch on your preferred streaming service. Or listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn. Tips on deals, mergers, activist situations, or anything else? Email [email protected].
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