Even with chances of a recession rising, CFOs are still thinking growth in 2025. Or at least they were in November.

According to a Gartner Finance survey released this week, 87% of CFOs said they were likely to spend money on organic growth in 2025. But the survey was conducted in November 2024, and we are in a very different world six months later. Gartner also doesn’t specify if the survey took place before or after President Trump’s victory.

Common financial sense would suggest that businesses should hoard a little extra money during these volatile times. But Janel Everly, senior director analyst in the Gartner Finance practice, suggested in the report that the best companies actually do the opposite.

She stated that businesses that grow efficiently and effectively invest in growth during hard times and “reduce operating costs when experiencing strong growth.”

Seems like some CFOs are following her wisdom. Acquisitions ranked as the second most common spending strategy for 2025; 61% of the 110 survey respondents planned to invest in them. This could end up as a good tariff mitigation strategy as companies shift manufacturing to the US or lower-tariffed countries.

For more on CFOs’ growth priorities, click here.—JK

There’s an AI infrastructure spending spree happening, and commercial property insurer FM Global sees that as a challenge for the insurance industry to tackle.

“They’re building dozens of these things a year, and quite honestly, the capacity in the [insurance] marketplace, the knowledge of the market hasn’t been able to keep up,” according to FM CEO Malcolm Roberts. “If I’ve got a client base that’s saying, ‘How do I build this so it’s resilient, and I’ve got money to invest that capital to make it resilient?’…that’s my prime customer.”

Rhode Island-based FM insures about 1,100 data centers totaling $250 billion in value, and its engineers spend about 30,000 hours a year working with data center providers. FM recently launched a new virtual resource program called Intellium to help policyholders better understand and manage data center risks.

Roberts recently sat down with CFO Brew at the Riskworld conference in Chicago to talk about the opportunities and risks in data centers. He also discussed the growing threat of secondary perils (think: flooding and wildfires) and how FM is incentivizing organizations to better manage those risks.

Keep reading here.—AZ

The US and China spent the weekend working on a trade agreement that could significantly lower the 145% tariff rate Trump proposed earlier this year. The trade talks came just a few days after the US struck a deal with the UK to remove trade barriers on key products such as beef and ethanol, while retaining a 10% baseline tariff on Great Britian.

In the meantime, the debate continues over who these tariffs will benefit. Writing for Marketplace Pulse, analyst Ben Donovan argued last week that Chinese firms paradoxically could end up benefiting the most from the tariffs.

Citing comments from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Donovan explained that US sellers sourcing from Chinese manufacturers often have to deal with intermediary suppliers, whereas Chinese firms are selling directly to US consumers, and so have “a significantly lower baseline” when it comes to cost.

The backdrop for this situation, he added, is that Chinese sellers have steadily gained market share on Amazon’s marketplace, surpassing the 50% threshold in January as US sellers fell to about 45%, per a report from Marketplace Pulse.

Buying American: Yet this longer-term hit could soon come against a US consumer base that is more invested in buying American.

Keep reading Retail Brew’s story on understanding how consumers are reacting to tariffs, here.—AV