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CFO Brew

Quarter Century Project

Courtney Vien

cfobrew.com

Tariffs. So many tariffs. Retaliatory tariffs. Negotiations. Deals. The invoking of obscure trade laws. 2025? Nope. 2018.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump placed tariffs on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, and washing machines and solar panels. Countries retaliated with tariffs on US imports. Some of the tariffs expired, some were removed or extended through negotiation, and others have stuck around.

CFOs and finance leaders who worked through the first Trump trade war might be experiencing déjà vu. Some of the 

 the first time around still apply today. But there are some key differences between 2018 and the current round of tariffs that can make strategizing for them more of a challenge.

The biggest target of Trump’s first trade war, by far, was China. The US government concluded that China was using unfair trade practices around intellectual property, technology, and innovation. Invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, it levied a 25% tariff affecting $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, mostly mechanical parts and equipment, in spring 2018. China retaliated with a 25% tariff on $50 billion in US imports, largely vehicles and agricultural products like soybeans. In September 2018, the US added tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. China again followed suit by tariffing an additional $60 billion in US imports.

This particular trade “battle” ended in January 2020 after negotiations between the two countries, in which China agreed to purchase an extra $200 billion in US imports by December 2021. (China 

But that wasn’t all. In February and March 2018, the US invoked a little-used provision of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to levy tariffs of 25% on steel imports and 10% on aluminum imports, worth around $48 billion in total. China retaliated, and so did other countries, among them Canada, Turkey, and India. The EU placed 25% tariffs on more than 

 of US goods, including corn, bourbon, jeans, motorcycles, and suntanning beds. (Can tariffs be passive-aggressive?)

The US levied more targeted tariffs, meant to benefit specific American industries, as well, like on imported solar panels and washing machines.

In some ways, the first trade war hasn’t really ended. In 2022, President Biden chose to extend some of the solar panel tariffs for four more years, and in 2024 he placed new tariffs on Chinese goods including semiconductors, EVs, batteries, minerals, and magnets. Then came 2025, and, well, you know the rest.

Economic effects were muted, and mostly negative: 

How did the first Trump trade war affect the US economy? Its long-term effects are hard to separate from other factors such as the pandemic and 

The short-term effects were modest. Some US industries and regions “benefited from additional protection from competition,” Kari Heerman, director of trade and economic statecraft at Brookings, told CFO Brew, and saw “some pretty small gains in terms of employment.” But in broader terms, the US experienced “a manufacturing recession in 2019,” Jason Miller, professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told us. US manufacturers that imported tariffed inputs, such as parts, materials, and equipment, exported less than those that weren’t exposed to tariffs, because their costs and therefore prices grew, he noted.

And US sectors that China and other countries retaliated against saw employment dip. “China basically stopped buying soybeans from the United States to the point where we had to 

,” Miller pointed out. China still imports far fewer agricultural products from the US than it did prior to the 2018–19 tariffs, Heerman told us.

“Even after Covid, we lost a lot of our [Chinese] 

,” Heerman said. “We were able to find some alternative markets, and that’s fine for some commodities, but the ones that were really China-heavy—pork, soybeans, sorghum, some of the nuts and fruits—never really came back,” Heerman said.

The tariffs the Trump administration has levied in 2025 are different from the first round. The 2018–19 tariffs were largely targeted at China, and affected “things that businesses buy rather than what consumers buy,” Heerman said. The new tariffs touch far more countries and sectors.

Consumer demand was also higher, generally speaking, in 2018–19 than it is today. Then, companies “felt more confident that they could pass on” the costs, Miller said. “The importers are absorbing a greater share of the tariffs this time around.” In sectors where demand is high right now, such as electrical equipment, 

Business leaders could have a difficult time gauging how much the tariffs should affect their long-term investments. On the one hand, “tariffs tend to be sticky,” Heerman said, because they’re legally and politically difficult to unwind. On the other hand, companies may be reluctant to make large investments in, say, factories, if they think a new presidential administration could undo the tariffs, Miller said.

In fact, both Heerman and Miller argue, tariffs could disadvantage US manufacturers that, like those in many other developed nations, source cheaper parts and labor from abroad. Placing tariffs on these inputs will inflate manufacturers’ cost structure, Miller said. When the US “goes it alone” with tariffs in a world where trade is globalized, Heerman said, US producers will face “a cost increase that their competitors outside the US don’t face.” That could make their exports pricier and thus “less attractive and less competitive on the global market,” Miller said.

Tariffs can work in certain limited cases, Miller and Heerman agreed—for instance, if a country has evidence that a competing nation is “subsidizing an industry and dumping product” in a way that threatens a key sector the first country wants to protect, Miller explained.

But they both caution that, today, broadly applied tariffs make little economic sense. Trade has just become too global.

“Our biggest exporters also tend to be our biggest importers,” Miller said. He likened the current round of tariffs to “fighting a Pickett’s Charge against essentially all the economic theory on trade over the last 40 years.”

As far as tariffs go, history repeating itself might not be a good thing.

Before the Trump trade war, there was the other Trump trade war

 The 2018 tariffs are and aren’t like the ones we’re seeing today.

Natasha Piñon

A young female CEO with a uniquely charismatic presence? Check. A complicated new technology that few people understood? Check. A big-name board that seemed to govern with its eyes closed and ears plugged? Check. Media hoopla? Check.

The downfall of Theranos, the blood testing company launched by Elizabeth Holmes, has been covered ad nauseam: You’ve seen 

For CFOs, however, there’s a lesson lurking right under the surface of the existing narrative: So 

 is what happens when a company doesn’t have a CFO? Well, yes and no.

Before Elizabeth Holmes was a federal prisoner, she was just a young founder firing her company’s CFO, Henry Mosley, who only held the seat for eight months before he was sacked in 2006.

Mosley, a finance vet who had already taken two tech companies public by the time he joined Theranos, expressed concern that the company showed falsified test results to potential pharmaceutical investors, per Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou’s 2018 book on the Theranos fallout.

When Mosley voiced trepidation, “Elizabeth’s expression suddenly changed,” Carreyrou wrote of the incident. “Her cheerful demeanor of just moments ago vanished and gave way to a mask of hostility. It was like a switch had been flipped. She leveled a cold stare at her chief financial officer. ‘Henry, you’re not a team player,’ she said in an icy tone. ‘I think you should leave right now.’”

He did—and the company never hired another CFO. That should’ve been red flag #1.

“That was relatively early days,” Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, told CFO Brew of Mosley’s firing. “For the CFO to be dismissed, a C-suite executive to be dismissed, and for there to be no inquiry from the board is remarkable. It’s an abdication of duty, really.”

For Skeet, who has interviewed Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz and developed business ethics teaching modules around his experience, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Theranos case “was the relatively young age and lack of experience of its CEO, which 

be augmented and balanced out by a competent board.”

That was not the case at Theranos—and that became exceptionally clear with the firing of the company’s CFO.

Reading off the names on the company’s board feels like flipping through flashcards for an APUSH quiz: Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state; Jim Mattis, former secretary of defense; George Shultz, yet another former secretary of state, and Richard Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo.

“The board for Theranos was really a rock star board, more of ‘in name only’ high-profile people, but not people who had expertise in the industry that the firm was operating in, and I thought that was a real obvious miss,” Skeet noted.

Similarly, Bill Miller, a professor of accounting at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, where he focuses on accounting ethics, says the Theranos board appeared to be “totally hands-off.”

“You can’t run a business without somebody watching the store,” he added. “The sheer lack of internal controls, controls in any way, is just scary, and so the need for really good financial leadership, but also then a strong internal audit component, has to be there, and without that, we see what happens.”

While seemingly every form of internal governance was missing at Theranos, Skeet noted that many boards “operate under this adage of ‘noses in but fingers out,’” meaning “it’s okay to be nosing around and asking a lot of questions, but you shouldn’t get involved in the day-to-day management of companies.” That can get messy, however, at “young companies and in companies that are working with brand new technologies, like artificial intelligence today.”

At Theranos, both were true: “It was a relatively young company, 

 it had an unproven technology. You would expect the board to be more engaged,” she said.

“At a minimum, you’'d want to know, was the CFO fired because they were cooking the books? Was the CFO doing something that was irresponsible, and do we have some exposure as a company as a result of some missteps by them?” she added, in reference to the board. “But in this case, being summarily dismissed relatively early in the company’s history, without looking into that, is unheard of.”

So how on earth could a board seemingly fail to ask any follow-up questions of a fired C-suite executive? Both Skeet and Miller point to the unique charisma of Elizabeth Holmes, whose pull was so strong that even when Shulz, the whistleblower whose grandfather was board member George Shulz, “tried to draw his grandfather’s attention to the fact that there were problems, he was dismissed,” Skeet said. “People were taken in a bit by her, and didn’t do their due diligence as a result.”

If you’re a CFO reading this, you know your company has a CFO. And let’s assume your board isn’t wrapped around the finger of a cunningly charming young Stanford dropout CEO. And let’s also assume you’re not defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Proud of you!

There’s still plenty to learn from Theranos and the firing of its CFO. If anything, the downfall of Theranos is a perfect storm of worst case…everything.

And if you’re curious what the exact opposite looks like: Skeet has conducted research comparing Silicon Valley and the Basque Country in Spain, comparing the two regions to “identify conditions that make it more likely for ethics to be used in organizations.”

The first condition is “a symbiotic relationship with society,” in which company culture stresses a sense of responsibility to society and acknowledges how things happening in society impacts the company in turn. Theranos had lofty goals on this front…but with fake results.

Next, companies more likely to use ethical practices foster a “climate of mutual understanding and trust,” which is identifiable, Skeet said, by whether or not “there’s a comfort level with decentralized decision-making, because there’s some kind of rubric for ethical decision-making in the company.” In short, executives can trust that employees know right from wrong, and can make their own decisions. At Theranos, “decisions were pretty tightly controlled by Elizabeth and Sunny Balwani, her COO,” she added.

Another hallmark of ethical leadership? People feel “comfortable coming forward and raising concerns” about the company, Skeet noted. “Obviously, when the CFO did that in this company, he was fired. So that isn’t creating a climate of mutual trust and understanding.”

Finally, the last key condition “is a set of ethical deliberation practices,” Skeet said, including “thinking about downstream effects, things that could go wrong, anticipating those, and then, whenever possible, sharing the thinking behind decisions that are made.”

“Those practices were not in place at Theranos,” she added. “Looking at it from the 30,000 foot level, it’s less likely for ethics [to be] used in a company where none of the conditions are present.”

Would a CFO have prevented the Theranos fraud?

Without a CFO, no one was watching the financials. 

Jesse Klein

We’re sure you’ve heard the phrase “I’m moving to Canada” recently. But corporations have been pulling this move—called a tax inversion—for decades, at least on paper. But rather than a political statement—or a fondness for poutine—heading abroad helped corporations avoid billions in taxes.

Bear with us, because explaining how it works can be a mouthful. A 

 is a loophole in which a US-based company merges with, or acquires, a foreign company in a lower corporate tax jurisdiction and then claims to be a subsidiary of the foreign company in order to avoid paying higher US taxes.

By shifting its headquarters to another country, a business still has some US tax liability, but companies can significantly reduce their tax bills by shifting profits abroad or borrowing from the foreign parent and deducting interest payments to offset profits. According to a 2017 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, 60 corporations completed inversions between 1983 and 2015.

And the practice was growing: In 2014, the combined assets of companies announcing plans for inversions was $319 billion, “more than the combined assets of all of the corporations that had inverted over the previous 30 years,” according to the CBO. The Obama administration estimated that the US stood to lose tens of billions in tax revenue as the practice increased.

“The feeling in Washington, among the lawmakers and among Treasury people, was this may be technically legal, but it shouldn’t be allowed,” Alistair Nevius, former editor in chief of tax at AICPA’s magazines and newsletters in 2014, told CFO Brew.

As more companies looked to inversions to reduce their tax bills, in September 2014, the Obama administration took action to close the inversion loophole by 

 that made the practice much more difficult, and less advantageous.

“I think the regs were fairly successful in at least slowing down corporate inversions,” Nevius said. “Certainly the attention to them really went away.”

Within a few short years, the Obama-era regulations on tax inversions seriously curtailed the practice, and the Trump administration would later pass legislation that essentially ended inversions.

In part, the 2014 Treasury regulations changed the ownership requirements of inversion transactions. The new regulations mandated that a company was still liable for American taxes if “less than 25 percent of the new multinational entity’s business activity is in the home country of the new foreign parent,” and the shareholders of the American corporation owned 60% or more of the foreign company. In 2016, new regulations also changed how organizations could account for intra-company debt, further weakening the advantages of tax inversions.

“[Tax inversion regulations] gave companies a lot more hoops that they had to jump through in order to do it successfully,” Nevius said.

In other words, if the company is doing business in the US and is owned by American shareholders, the new entity is considered an American corporation, no matter how it moves money around. Voilà, loophole closed.

“It was a bold step by the Treasury and we encouraged them,” Steve Rosenthal, former senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, who was also an advisor to the Obama Treasury Department at the time, told us.

But companies weren’t happy about it. According to Rosenthal, there was backlash from some in the 

 that argued the regulations went beyond the Treasury’s authority. And while there was a threat to take the administration to court, that challenge 

 found that the Obama-era anti-inversion rules led to a decline in foreign direct investment in the US, suggesting that tax-driven mergers and acquisitions had indeed slowed.

But the real nail in the coffin of tax inversions was the first Trump administration’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which brought the 

 from 35% to 21%. According to Nevius, bringing the corporate tax rate more in line with other countries took away a big incentive to find creative ways of avoiding taxes, and put corporate inversions on the back burner.

“I don’t think there’s been a real big name corporate inversion since then,” he said.

Even though the Trump administration’s business tax cut curtailed most corporate inversions, Trump considered 

 with Obama’s Treasury rules on inversions. But ultimately they were 

“What I took from that was that even the Trump administration, a business-oriented administration, appreciated the fact that these regulations were both effective to stop the abuse, and not too burdensome,” Rosenthal said.

Treasury Department cracks down on corporate tax inversions

But did it work?

Accounting once ran on a whole lot of dead trees.

Jim Bourke, a partner at accounting firm Withum who’s been with the firm since 1987, remembers those days. Before the cloud, if you asked your accountant for a copy of an old tax return, for instance, “it could be a couple of weeks by the time you get it,” he told CFO Brew.

Staff would need to get it out of the physical file room at the office, photocopy it, and either mail it to you or have you pick it up, he said. (And cross your fingers that no one shelved your paperwork in the wrong file.)

The advent of cloud-based accounting software changed all that. The cloud “was a revolution,” according to Bourke, who, as managing director of his firm’s advisory services branch, has helped many firms build out their tech stacks.

SaaS made it possible for accountants to work remotely, to hire and find clients from pretty much anywhere with internet access, and to provide clients with faster and more convenient service. But getting firms on the cloud hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Cloud software for accounting first emerged in the late 1990s with the advent of NetLedger, the ancestor of NetSuite. By 2009, accounting software giants CCH, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters all had web-based tax preparation programs. But the first generation of cloud products was “very feature-thin,” Randy Johnston, a consultant with 40 years’ accounting software experience, told CFO Brew.

By 2012, cloud technology had advanced to the point where the profession took notice, in the form of the inaugural Digital CPA Conference, originally named the Digital CPA 

, which took place in October of that year. Around 2013 was when cloud products “started to get enough features that they could kind of work,” Johnston said. One of the pioneers of cloud accounting, he sat in the original design meetings for QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct.

But accounting firms were still wary. Convincing them to give up their onsite servers “was like taking their baby away,” Bourke, an early adopter and cloud evangelist, told us. One partner at a firm told him, “‘I want to be able to put my arms around the server,’” he recalled. Firms were concerned about data breaches, but they also feared change in general.

“They got so used to the way in which they did things. Most firms went to the cloud kicking and screaming.” he said.

The pandemic was what really spurred firms to join the cloud, Bourke noted. When firms weren’t able to get into their offices or visit clients on-site, they quickly saw the value of being able to access data remotely. “Everyone finally realized, ‘Oh my God, this cloud thing makes a ton of sense,’” Bourke told us.

Desktop’s being sunsetted, but laggards remain: 

Today, many vendors have discontinued their legacy desktop products. Intuit stopped accepting new US subscriptions for QuickBooks Desktop in September 2024. Most new vendors entering the market only offer cloud products, Bourke said.

But not all firms are on the cloud yet. Some of the holdouts seem to be smaller firms whose clients haven’t made the switch: Johnston said he recently spoke with a small Texas firm whose 20 clients are all on desktop, and it hasn’t even considered moving to the cloud. Firms that convert now may “have to leave some of their client base behind,” he said. And converting can be costly, he added: “You have to dedicate the resources and charge enough to get it done, and sometimes the clients aren’t willing to pay.”

Bourke feels that getting on the cloud is a no-brainer. “It’s accessible anywhere day or night or in any country, anywhere in the world,” he said, and because it’s scalable, it works for sole practitioners and huge firms alike. It allows firms to give clients the “Amazon experience” they’ve come to expect even from accountants, he said, and provide them with more convenient, transparent, and faster service.

But there are some drawbacks to the cloud, according to Johnston. Cloud software often isn’t as robust as the legacy programs it replaced, he said. Then there’s SaaS price creep to contend with. Since switching software is a big undertaking, if vendors raise prices, firms may feel they have little choice but to pay up. “That type of stuff is rampant in the accounting market,” Johnston said.

Security is a legitimate concern, Bourke added, admitting, “Data breaches keep me up at night.” But firms can protect themselves by choosing good providers, he said. He recommends looking for vendors that have had SOC II audits to help ensure they’re using best practices for data security.

AI could be accounting’s next digital “revolution,” Bourke believes. He hopes it will catch on more quickly than the cloud did. Change, he said, is necessarily painful, but his advice is to “get it over with; put it behind you.”

“It’s where you’ve got to go for the profession to remain relevant for so many years to come,” he concluded.

The history of accounting’s cloud revolution

The long, slow road to the cloud was paved with dead trees. 

Alex Zank

There’s a lot from the mid- to late-2000s that invites feelings of nostalgia.

Seth Rogen and his troupe dominated the comedy scene with hits like 

. Eli Manning and the Giants gave NFL fans the 

 in Super Bowl XLII. The 2007–08 global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession gave an entire generation lasting economic anxiety…wait a minute.

A core memory needn’t be cheerful to be consequential. Indeed, the financial crisis consequently led to passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, an overhaul of the US financial sector “on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression,” as then-President Barack Obama 

The Dodd-Frank Act was lawmakers’ response to “the shadow banking system at the time,” according to Mark Nelson, senior legal analyst at Wolters Kluwer, and they passed it in 2010.

That shadow banking system included “the largely unregulated businesses that were getting blamed for [the crisis],” such as mortgage lenders, Nelson told CFO Brew. “And I think the Dodd-Frank Act, it addresses those issues mostly in the banking provisions, like bank capital, bank stress testing, and things like that. But it also pulled in a lot of other topics that may or may not have been directly responsible for the financial crisis,” including hedge funds.

Dodd-Frank still plays a central role in public discourse 15 years later, though its future is uncertain in a Trump administration focused on deregulation. Before we go there, let’s examine all the ways it impacted banking and, more generally, corporate America.

 A breezy read that spans 2,300 pages, Dodd-Frank introduced 400 new regulations on Wall Street.

Fortunately, Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, a financial risk consultant and trainer, helped us summarize what the law did in far fewer words. She said Dodd-Frank had five main objectives:

It created new agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which Rodríguez Valladares said was a “dramatic change in how institutions were regulated” by centralizing the role of consumer watchdog against predatory lending and similar “miscreants.” Nelson at Wolters Kluwer also name-dropped the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which “was a new creation to look at systemic risk” in the financial sector.

By creating this plethora of new financial regulations, Dodd-Frank reminded the public that “banks can get into trouble” and there’s never a guarantee they’ll always remain open, Rodríguez Valladares said.

The law also created the Volcker Rule, which bans proprietary trading or speculation by banking institutions. As a bank, “you have to go through a fair amount of documentation to show to your risk managers and to the bank regulators, why exactly are you holding these stocks, why are you holding these bonds, why are you doing these derivatives,” she said. “And banks don’t like it.”

It created regulations for derivatives. Before Dodd-Frank, only derivatives that were traded on exchanges such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were subject to regulations, Rodríguez Valladares said. Over-the-counter derivatives such as interest-rate derivatives were not. “Transparency is key,” she said. “When different players know how much is outstanding, how much is being traded, what the prices are, it is a much, much better market.”

Dodd-Frank added more requirements for banks such as “living wills” that, according to the Federal Reserve website, “must describe the company’s strategy for rapid and orderly resolution in the event of material financial distress or failure of the company.”

Not everyone was happy with all this new red tape.

 Dodd-Frank had its critics, including Republican politicians. The law got through Congress largely because of Democratic support. Three Republican senators voted for Dodd-Frank, which was just enough to avoid a filibuster.

The GOP-controlled House Financial Services Committee website states that “Dodd-Frank reaches far beyond Wall Street and does not address the real causes of the crisis,” and former Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) once claimed that “it will take over 24 million man hours” annually to comply with just 224 of the law’s 400 regulations.

Rodríguez Valladares noted that large banks “fought…tooth and nail” against the Volcker Rule because of the added documentation it required, but “no, banks should not be casinos,” she said, “because they are holding your deposits…so they should not be speculating.”

It should be no surprise, then, to hear that Republican lawmakers put Dodd-Frank in their crosshairs in future Congressional sessions.

 Republicans got their first crack at rolling back Dodd-Frank in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Trump signed a law in May of that year that limited Dodd-Frank’s enhanced prudential standards to only the largest banks that had $250 billion or more in assets, among other things, according to 

. How many banks were that big? Fewer than 10, the New York Times 

. The legislation had bipartisan support, which was really 

Nelson said he sees potentially more rollbacks of Dodd-Frank regulations during Trump 2.0.

“I don’t know if we’ll see legislation on this or not, but we’re certainly seeing the Trump administration look at some regulatory rollbacks, reconsidering some of the rules themselves,” he said, noting that agencies are able to modify or rescind rules. “I think we’re probably seeing another round of that in the near to mid term.”

We’ve already gotten a taste of what’s to come. Trump wasted little time in gutting the CFPB and other agencies in the first months of his term. He fired most of the CFPB’s workforce as his administration works to 

. Republican legislators also recently took initial steps to 

Nelson said how far leaders will roll back Dodd-Frank, and through what method, “is a big open question right now.” It could be open season on Dodd-Frank regulations with the Supreme Court’s recent scrapping of the 

Rodríguez Valladares described Trump’s attempts to dismantle CFPB as “his first part of the agenda” to deregulate the finance sector. The agency is “the only national entity that is fully dedicated to protecting American consumers. So that really showed that protecting American consumers was not at the heart of what he intended to do,” she said. “The fact that he started out so aggressively tells me that there’s still more to come.”

In wake of 2007–08 financial crisis, Dodd-Frank changed the game

The law has already been watered down once and could suffer further rollbacks in Trump 2.0.

It’s like the old line attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Ask a CFO what parallels they see between the uncertainty of 2025 and the staggering economic collapse of 2007–8, and you’ll get some variant of that famous Twainism.

In the worst way, we’re so back. 60% of CFOs expect a recession by the end of 2025, according to a Q1 CNBC 

 the likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months to 35%.

And yet, everything’s different. To truly understand the potential dangers of our current moment, you have to look back. For starters: 2008 didn’t start like this. It started with a bang.

Here’s CFO Brew’s oral history of the 2008 crash, as told by finance and accounting professionals.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Ari Shwayder, lecturer of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, who worked at McKinsey before and after the 2008 crash: 

When things crashed, it was one of those classic [scenarios] when all of a sudden it happened all at once. It felt like everything was fine; there was very little uncertainty. And then, all of a sudden, the banking system blew apart over the course of a couple of months.

Shari Freedman, CFO for literacy nonprofit Room to Read: 

In 2008, it was immediate. Once [Lehman Brothers] collapsed, the whole market collapsed.

Kelly Bargabos, CFO and COO of San Diego Theatres: 

I was in the diamond jewelry industry when 2007–2008 hit. We were a wholesaler, and we sold to [high end] retail jewelry stores. We were hit really hard and really fast, [as] one of the first sectors to really be impacted by the real estate bubble that burst and the beginning of the economic downturn.

The reason we were hit so hard and so fast is 

 we were a luxury diamond jewelry brand, and the people who bought our products in the retail stores were the hedge fund managers. They were the Wall Street traders, all those people who lost their jobs, lost their income, lost their retirements. That was our customer base, those people with high disposable income.

Bill Zarrilli, CFO of CSMI Consulting Group, who was CFO for a sales training company during the crisis: 

When it first started, we noticed that clients were starting to defer their decisions for sales training, and we worked with Fortune 1000 companies. We started to get some visibility that companies were pulling back on sales training, and the reason they were giving us [was] their own business challenges, their own need to wait for better economic visibility.

As warning signs flared, it was quickly all hands on deck for finance professionals.

We didn’t have any fantasy about waiting it out, riding it out. We didn’t have the cash flow to do that. So we had to take some pretty drastic measures. [We got] down to a skeleton crew, and then it really became about cash management and inventory management.

Working with the CEO, we started to develop a strategic plan to reduce costs in the most thoughtful and measured way we could. We put everything on the table: headcount reductions, hiring and salary freezes, and obviously the deferral of any discretionary spending.

I lived and breathed hourly cash management [and] forecasting. How much cash do we have? What are we projecting for the week? How am I going to make payroll? Because we were maxed out on our line of credit, I only had available to me the money I collected in receivables. ​​My biggest takeaway that’s stayed with me for the last almost 20 years is that discipline around cash management, inventory management.

we began renegotiating our debt package. For us, that is the story of how we survived, to be frank, 2008 and everything that went after, because we successfully completed our transaction in early September. I remember flying to Houston and signing the bank deals, and I think a week or two later, [Lehman Brothers] fell apart and kicked off the financial collapse. Within weeks, other organizations had their credit lines discontinued. Everything sort of just started to collapse.

You couldn’t pay CFOs to go back to that stressful time, but eventually better days ahead came into sight.

After we experienced some significant declines in revenue in 2008 and 2009, it started to turn in 2010, when we actually saw the pipeline starting to grow again and revenue started to grow in 2010 versus 2009, so that was the turnaround time when we first saw some daylight.

There wasn’t a specific day or a moment when we were like, “Phew, okay, made it through that. Now we can get back to business as usual.” It was more of a slow loosening. Our business settled, but it was a very slow comeback.

After CFOs untangled the worst parts of the crisis, everyone had something they would’ve done differently.

What I learned is we could have spent more time using that downturn in business volume to focus on our processes, to improve them, and to focus on maybe there were some technology investments we could have made during that time, as limited as they might be. When you’re running fast and your business is growing, sometimes it’s hard to invest the time into some of those areas.

If you can remove some of the uncomfortableness of being in that situation out of your mindset and focus on process improvement and efficiencies that will maybe not make a major change to the business while you’re in that recessionary timeframe but will give you an edge on acceleration coming out of it, that’s where, facing that type of situation again, I would have tried to steer the organization to do more.

Looking back to that specific time period, I think what we could have done better is anticipate more what could happen to our market, and how fragile the luxury sector could be if high earners are threatened. In our culture, I think we have this false sense of security, especially in the luxury high income realm, because it’s very rarely threatened.

Ben Taylor, CFO of biotech company Recursion, who worked at Goldman Sachs during the 2008 crisis: 

Where I saw it go wrong [for CFOs in 2008] was when people assumed that it was just going to be short term, and so they put in short term measures, whether that’s short term debt or bridge financings, all of those sort of things that were meant for a six or a 12 or an 18 month fix. If you take shorter term fixes, that actually puts you in a position where you have a lot of risk exposure, because then you have to either refinance or create another fix 12, 18 months from now. But now you’re in a worse position, because the economy has continued to be bad.

In 2025, the lessons of 2008 still apply—even when it feels like we’re in uncharted territory.

The 2008 crisis was a very classic demand-side recession. There was a banking crisis that happened that caused people to get scared. People cut back on consumption, businesses cut back on investment, and so demand dropped precipitously. What I worry about right now is policymakers seem to be careening us toward a self-made, on the supply-side, recession. By introducing tariffs, that’s going to force costs and prices up on a lot of American companies and consumers. If that does happen, and we see prices going up and the economy is slowing down, then the Fed is in a bit of a pickle.

The thing I worry the most about is that there is the possibility that all this chaos will actually trigger something that is unintentional, but they can’t get their hands back on. They can’t get back control, because the destabilization of the cooperative environment is actually what is at stake here. [The US is] going after our allies…and I just don’t know that there would be a leader to step in and say, “We need to fix this together” if something triggers.

The things that got us out of 2008 and didn’t bring us to the brink of world disaster—we didn’t go into a depression. It was bad, but it wasn’t 10 years of bad. It was actually resolved because of that cooperative environment. I’m more worried about that, to be honest with you. That should we face something like that, there isn’t going to be cooperation.

It’s a really, really complex environment now. On any individual issue, it could be a black swan issue. But when you’ve got literally thousands of things expected and unexpected that could all have their own black swan issues, it’s just going to happen. What makes sense to me is we’re going to continue having a lot of volatility.

We’d like to live in this world where everything’s great, and sometimes it takes a crisis to stop us and remind us that we’re not as in control as we think we are. At this point in my career and the experiences that I’ve had, nothing would surprise me at this point.

How did [the 2008 crisis] shape my career? I think a lot of it is knowing that these events are not black swans, that these events are actually happening on a fairly regular basis. If you think about it, it’s about every decade: I saw the dotcom bubble burst first, and then there was 2008 and then Covid, and a lot of little things in between there too.

Don’t panic, and get your house in order. Collect receivables, send out your bills, pay your bills. Make sure that the day-to-day functionality of your business is working. Those pieces are the things you can anchor…and understand what your risks are.

If you’re vulnerable because you’re cash constrained, then you’re vulnerable to interest rates. If…your product is manufactured externally, someplace outside of the US, you’re more vulnerable to tariffs. It’s [about] understanding your business model and where your vulnerabilities are is the first place to think about, how am I going to navigate? Navigation is really about: Can I set myself up a 

An oral history of the 2008 market crash from CFOs who survived it

“At this point in my career and the experiences that I’ve had, nothing would surprise me,” one CFO said.

Let me take you back to the era of Y2K, my sweet summer children. Destiny’s Child and Christina Aguilera ruled the airwaves. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were married. And auditors had relationships that were just 

 with their clients—and Republicans and Democrats were able to agree, almost unanimously, on a massive piece of legislation. Truly, it was another time.

Prior to 2002, it wasn’t unusual for auditing firms to have lucrative consulting contracts with the selfsame clients they audited. This was the case with Big Five firm Arthur Andersen and Enron, the seventh-largest company trading on the US stock market. Then, in 2001, Enron went bankrupt amid an SEC investigation for fraud.

Enron’s executives had been cooking the books, courts found, and multiple Senate and House committees found that Arthur Andersen’s accounting practices facilitated their fraudulent activity. Arthur Andersen admitted to 

, and was forced to stop auditing public companies.

Investors’ confidence in capital markets was shaken. In response, Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland, and Representative Michael Oxley, a Republican from Ohio, proposed a bill that would regulate the auditing profession through 

 of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), render auditing firms more independent, require more robust reporting over internal controls, and hold top management responsible for the content of financial statements.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or SOX, as it was abbreviated, enjoyed broad bipartisan support. It passed almost unanimously in the House and Senate and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in July 2002.

The introduction of SOX signaled an evolution in how finance and accounting professionals fit within their organizations and the work they were expected to do.

SOX “created a lot of new challenges for the accounting profession in terms of resources,” Vin Nguyen, a partner at accounting firm UHY with 30 years’ audit experience, told CFO Brew. Nguyen was promoted to assurance manager around the time SOX became law. He remembers that firms needed to design and implement new audit approaches, all while absorbing an influx of new clients that had once belonged to Arthur Andersen.

On the client side, SOX brought challenges as well. The “cost of auditing skyrocketed,” former SEC Chair Mary Jo White said during a 

 at St. Joseph’s University. So did the 

. In fact, SOX may have contributed to the private equity boom, Nguyen, who’s worked on many IPOs and SPACs, surmises.

Companies, he said, are “always contemplating, does it make sense for us to be a public company, or does it make sense to stay private and take on the capital from private equity” and not have to deal with SEC requirements?

Julie Bell Lindsay, now CEO of the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ), joined the SEC as counsel to Commissioner Cynthia Glassman, in the office of rulemaking, just a few months after SOX became law, and helped to implement it. She describes the atmosphere at the SEC as “exhilarating…We really felt like we had a lot of work to do to instill trust back in the capital markets,” she told us.