It’s the “will they, won’t they” arc of the summer. And we’re not talking about our favorite TV show, The Summer I Turned Pretty.

No, the question on our mind is: Will there be a recession soon, or won’t there? And like a lot of relationships, the answer is complicated.

After a tumultuous first half of the year of bad workforce breakups, trade deal make-ups, and tariff uncertainty, experts told CFO Brew they expect an economic slowdown, but aren’t convinced a recession is imminent.

By the numbers. Earlier this year, CFOs seemed to be strapping in for a recession. In March, 60% of CFOs in a CNBC survey said they expected a recession in the back half of 2025. Two months later, a study from Billtrust said that “more than four in five financial decision-makers” thought a recession within the next year was likely or possible. And 97% of CFOs surveyed were starting to bunker down with more careful cash management and budgeting, according to the Billtrust survey.

But as the year progressed and tariffs continued to be delayed, recession fears began to ease in the C-suite. In July, a survey of 122 CEOs from The Conference Board showed that in Q3, only 36% feared a recession in the next 12–18 months, a substantial drop from 83% in Q2.

How likely is a recession?—JK

Public companies that go looking for a CFO (and there have been a lot of them lately) tend to favor those with experience, according to the latest Russell Reynolds CFO Turnover Index.

Global CFO turnover at public companies reached a seven-year peak in the first half of 2025, with 173 finance chiefs being replaced during the period, the index shows. Appointments were up slightly from 169 in the first six months of 2024. Turnover was particularly high among S&P 500 companies and in the industrial and natural sources sectors, according to the consulting firm.

The increase in CFO turnover came from “increased retirement rates and record high CEO turnover in 2024,” Russell Reynolds noted. The firm found that 56% of outgoing CFOs in H1 either retired or transitioned to board roles, another seven-year high and “significantly above” the 41% seven-year average.

Amid a busy six months of CFO turnover, the proportion of women appointed to CFO roles declined YoY to 22%, from a first-half record of 28% in 2024.

Most CFO appointments were internal hires. Insiders had the best path to CFO positions at public companies: More than half (57%) of incoming CFOs came from within the companies, a slight YoY uptick from 54%.

What’s the state of CFO turnover?—AZ

AI might be harming entry-level workers’ job prospects, at least in certain fields, new research suggests.

An as-yet unpublished study by three Stanford researchers found that, between late 2022 and July 2025, employment of people ages 22–25 “in the most AI-exposed occupations,” such as software developers, customer service representatives, and marketing and sales managers, fell by 6% overall. It dropped 13% compared with employment of people from the same age group in jobs with low exposure to AI.

But even in the most AI-exposed occupations, employment rose by 6%–9% for “older workers” (meaning, roughly, workers over 25) during the 2022–25 time period, the researchers found, suggesting that AI might be displacing certain entry-level jobs.

The researchers drew upon monthly payroll data for “tens of thousands” of companies from payroll provider ADP. To gauge how vulnerable a job might be to AI displacement, they looked at factors such as whether AI could perform tasks that fell under its description in the Labor Department’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, as well as the number of Anthropic GenAI model Claude queries related to those tasks.

Their findings held true even when the researchers controlled for “firm-level shocks,” such as interest rate increases, that could have accounted for a drop in entry-level hiring.

How is AI impacting entry level jobs?—CV

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Head of Finance & Controller at an undisclosed organization (hybrid)
• Divisional Chief Financial Officer in financial services (in person)
• Tax Director, Commercial Services in financial services (remote)
• Senior Vice President in financial services (hybrid)
• Tax Director in financial services (remote)