Just when we thought 2022 was fully behind us, public companies are here to report the reality of what most of us remember as just a blissful holiday season. Finish your hot chocolate and grab your best knitted sweater, because the US’s largest banks are about to report their earnings, and analysts are expecting the results will send a chill through the markets.

“Everyone is keen to better understand how deep and how long the slowdown in earnings growth—or…the expected decline in earnings growth will last,” Gina Martin Adams, chief equity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, told CFO Brew. Right now, the consensus is that “S&P 500 earnings will fall year over year for the fourth quarter, [as well as] the first and second quarter of 2023,” Martin Adams said. “It ends up falling on the company’s shoulders to confirm or deny that.”

If CFO Brew’s Ins and Outs for 2023 are any indication, we should be hearing mentions of prioritizing long-term versus short-term growth, the importance of cash flow, and retention instead of labor growth. We’re keeping our ears out for any technology or R&D investment, which despite tight cash flows, still is top of mind for finance chiefs.

Challenges are certainly on the horizon for CFOs. Kevin Doyle, EVP and CFO for New Balance, told CFO Brew that the “high cost of capital, continued inflationary pressures, fear of a deep recession, and continued impact of a volatile geopolitical environment” will continue to affect how companies operate in 2023.

The big banks of Wall Street got straight to the low point in their projections. Morgan Stanley wrote in its investment outlook that “early in 2023, earnings will collapse, bringing the stock market down with them.” Continue reading here.—KT

Make no bones about it: Things feel donked up right now. Persistent, relentless, and unprecedented business risks abound in 2023.

To deal with an increasingly risky and complex world, finance professionals will need to step up and become more deliberate about aligning organizational risk management with strategic goals, according to Vikash Agarwal, financial services risk and regulatory leader at PwC.

“The CFO and business strategy need to be linked more closely together than they’ve ever been in the past,” Agarwal said. “You can’t use past indicators to predict the future.”

Sure, we could run through a laundry list of global risks with the potential to disrupt your business this year: rising cybersecurity threats, geopolitical instability and conflict, a possible recession, climate disasters, unpredictable interest rates and monetary policy, the pandemic that just won’t quit—the list goes on.

But rather than predicting what might go wrong in the global landscape, we thought it would be more useful to explore how finance professionals can best deal with risk management challenges this year.

These are the risk management tactics and trends that finance professionals should be paying attention to in 2023, risk experts told us.

Align risk and strategy. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, risk management was often seen as a siloed exercise separate from business strategy, but that is no longer the case, according to Valerie Nielsen, managing partner at Longview Leader Corporation.

For companies to effectively deal with risk, now they will have to communicate risk management and strategy in tandem across the organization, she said. Taken together, risk management and strategy gives organizations a tool for evaluating decision-making.  “You can use risks to look at how these things are unfolding and hopefully identify earlier, unintended consequences of decisions,” she said.

But enterprise risk management goes beyond the CFO, according to Agarwal. Continue reading here.—DA

Stat: $5 billion. That’s the amount of cash and other liquid assets that bankrupt crypto exchange FTX says it has recovered, after federal prosecutors announced they planned to seize at least $500 million of FTX-related assets in their prosecution of company co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried. (CNBC)

Quote: “The push for return-to-office hasn’t been received with open arms, we’ll say.”—Glassdoor lead economist Daniel Zhao, offering a theory about why Apple fell off its Best Places to Work list for 2023. Meta, formerly Facebook, also failed to make the list this year. (Bloomberg)

Read: Workers in the tech field are being inundated with job offers after being laid off. One problem: Many of the offers are fake. (the Wall Street Journal)