Over the past two months, the share of executives expecting troubled global markets to overwhelm domestic fundamentals has doubled, to 18 percent. This is perhaps the most telling of several findings from our most recent survey, indicating how deeply the eurozone’s financial crisis has shaken executives’ confidence in the world economy.¹ Indeed, for the first time since March 2009, the executives’ confidence in the state of their own economies fell, as have their expectations for the future.

However, most see their companies’ prospects as fairly stable, if a bit less rosy than they did two months ago. A strong majority of them still expect profits to increase, and the share expecting to hire remains stable overall, at about a third—though the prospects for workers in the eurozone are markedly worse. Executives still expect low consumer spending to be the biggest threat to growth, and they are a little more worried than they were: the share expecting demand to increase has fallen back to half, the level in February, from 60 percent in April. Executives at companies in China are pursuing growth from consumers in emerging markets more keenly than are executives anywhere else.