Executive Confidence "Doom & Gloom"

WHAT holiday cheer? The latest quarterly poll of chief financial officers conducted by Duke University, Tilburg University and CFO magazine, a sister publication of The Economist, makes for grim reading. Of the 1,275 finance chiefs quizzed, those in Europe and America were more gloomy about their regional economies than ever before, with pessimists far outnumbering optimists. A third of companies in both regions, from a wide range of industries, said that they were directly affected by the recent credit-market turmoil. Optimism is relatively higher in Asia.