As CEO, and working for the company I have for 45 years, there’s never been less confidence about what’s going to happen in the next 10 years.  Never in my whole career did I worry that we didn’t have a plan for the next 10 years.

Link Hoewing at Verizon Policy Blog

I often blog about economic issues but generally in the context of Verizon’s industry and with relation to the Internet and broadband technologies.   But our CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, recently gave a speech at the Economic Club about the economy and his thoughts about how to help boost investment, innovation and growth.   He gave an answer to a fairly standard question that CEOs often get at forums like this (“What keeps you up at night”?) that made me ponder broader economic trends.  Here is what he said:

As CEO, and working for the company I have for 45 years, there’s never been less confidence about what’s going to happen in the next 10 years.  Never in my whole career did I worry that we didn’t have a plan for the next 10 years.  I think we have a plan for the next 10 years. But the average guy on the street – our workers, your friends – everybody’s trying to figure out how will America transform itself, what will the work be of the future, how will we get from here to there.  I’ve taken upon myself – in my remarks today and in the activities of our company – to help really focus the country around how we create work.  It’s not obvious where that (work) comes from.  I think in the past, it was almost an entitlement.  There was always another industry on the horizon for people to then focus on and get work.  Right now, everyone is scared to death that some people will work, the world will work, but people aren’t sure we’ll work. So as an American CEO — John Castellani is here, and every member of the BRT (Business Roundtable) CEO group — we really want to hammer home this idea:  we have to help fix this perception that America’s future isn’t quite as strong as it’s always been, and the way to get at that is to show people how we’re going to put everybody to work.

Since Ivan’s speech, I have been seeing many more articles about the economy that raise concerns about its path forward and its performance.  Some have even suggested that we may be facing another slow down or “double dip”.  Among the most thoughtful was this op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in which he made this observation:

Can anything protect us from the dangers of stagnation or a double dip? Actually, there is a second stimulus that could have a dramatic effect on the economy — even more so than government spending. And it won’t add to the deficit.   The Federal Reserve recently reported that America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets. By any calculation (for example, as a percentage of assets), this is higher than it has been in almost half a century. Yet most corporations are not spending this money on new plants, equipment or workers. Were they to loosen their purse strings, hundreds of billions of dollars would start pouring through the economy. These investments would probably have greater effect and staying power than a government stimulus.

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