The Scene
Semafor World Economy kicks off on Monday in Washington, DC, where more than 500 global CEOs, world leaders, finance ministers and policymakers are set to speak at the annual gathering, including US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and top executives from firms ranging from Goldman Sachs and Citadel to Hyundai, Eli Lilly, Anthropic, and Total Energy.
The largest-ever US convening of CEOs and government officials comes at a time of deep unease.
The world is essentially holding its breath to see if the tenuous ceasefire US President Donald Trump declared last week will hold with Iran in a war that has already upended global energy markets and injected uncertainty into every sector from airlines to tech to finance. CEOs were already confronting a period of rapid change thanks to seismic shifts in AI, sustained inflation and on-again, off-again tariffs, and many are now struggling with how to digest the latest round of developments.
There’s plenty of room for optimism, though. US capital markets remain shockingly resilient, as technology and innovation march forward at the fastest clip in decades. And while navigating Washington isn’t getting any easier, world leaders are starting to lurch out of a wait-and-see mode and chart their own paths to prosperity.
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Attendees at Semafor World Economy include Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz, Dangote Group President Aliko Dangote, JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty, and hundreds of other CEOs who will explain how they’re facing these issues and what they’re telling their employees, customers, partners and other constituencies.
Of particular interest: What the future holds for a US capitol that may soon no longer be completely controlled by Trump and the Republican Party, as well as the Gulf, where massive amounts of global capital, infrastructure, and tech dollars have flocked for over a decade, as nations opened up their borders and sought to diversify their economies before the Iran war slowed business.
Even if ships again pass through the Strait of Hormuz unencumbered and energy prices moderate, one of the biggest economic lessons from the war — and tariffs before that — is that it pays to invest in buffers from the increasingly volatile global markets.
Diversification is also top of mind of the finance world, as Wall Street’s shiniest toy — private credit — has become its latest black eye, as well as consumer businesses that are trying to into peek into the minds of shoppers to figure out how to get them to spend money in the wake of all the uncertainty.