Semafor World Economy Summit: Views from CEOs and lawmakers on geopolitical uncertainty impacting small businesses

On the US-China relationship: A return to the pre-trade war status quo between the US and China is “inconceivable” under the Donald Trump administration, Bremmer said. He said the relationship between the two superpowers is “not fixable.”

“I don’t see this Chinese government finding its way to yes with the United States anytime soon,” he said. “Their senior leadership considers present tariff levels a joke, and I use that word literally.”

While the Chinese economy “is going to get hit a lot worse” in the near term, ultimately, Beijing will be the primary beneficiary of the US’ “unprecedented acts of geopolitical self-harm,” Bremmer said.

On Trump’s approach to US allies: “He’s not doing a good job at getting the outcomes he wants in picking fights with everyone simultaneously,” Bremmer said.

“Even if he had had a level of very significant trust with the Japanese and the Europeans and the Canadians coming in — which he did not — he’s done so much in his power to further erode that trust over the past three months that they’re going to find every which way to say that we are not going to follow you on China,” he said.

On Trump’s approach to Russia-Ukraine negotiations: Bremmer said that Trump is “unwilling to put sufficient pressure on the Russians” to get them to a ceasefire, and is unwilling to blame them for not being able to get the peace deal he has promised. The outcome of that, Bremmer predicted, is that Trump “walks away from both countries, which means no more US aid for the Ukrainians… and no rapprochement with Russia.”

On Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policies: “Biden believes a strong EU is in America’s advantage and Trump does not. He wants Brexit all over the place,” Bremmer said. “I think that permanent damage has been done to the US-EU relationship.”

On the US-Indo-Pacific relationship: Despite “the rattling,” he said, the relationship with those countries will remain strong. “They will still be able to engage economically in ways that are comfortable to them with the Chinese.”

On the outlook for US neighbors: Bremmer predicted Mexico will “do everything possible to capitulate to US terms,” but said that Canada believes its relationship with the US “is as strategically as much of a mistake as Germans doing Nord Stream with Russia.”

On Trump’s trade policy: Silverman said that independent workers like those on Etsy would become “collateral damage” as the Trump administration’s trade policies focus on large companies. “If we’re prepared to make exemptions for Apple, shouldn’t we be prepared to look after a single mother working from her home, making something and selling it to someone else?”

On de minimis exemptions: Silverman said some companies do abuse the de minimis exemption rule to ship low-value goods en masse, and that the policy could use some “common-sense reform.” Silverman, who met the National Economic Council Thursday to discuss the de minimis exemption, said he wants to maintain the exemptions for the “honest small sellers,” as it helps ensure “that we can still allow people to start a business without causing too much friction.”

Etsy entrepreneurs need caregiving support: Silverman said that Etsy sellers — 85% of whom are women, with one out of four tending a child at home — are asking for more caregiving help from federal and state governments.

“We need it to be affordable and we need it to be more accessible, meaning more trained caregiving specialists,” Silverman said. Congress has shown bipartisan interest in supporting caregivers, he said. It’s “just a matter of finding the right vehicle to get it through,” he said, noting that a budget reconciliation package “might be an opportunity.”

On the challenges small businesses are facing: “Cash flow is No. 1,” Cassidy said. “For all of you who run large businesses that have a supply chain that involves small businesses, the No. 1 thing you can do to help [is] pay on time.”

On artificial intelligence: “Tomorrow’s worker is going to be AI-native, an AI agent, or AI-enabled,” Cassidy said. “My goal is to bring my workforce along on that journey and have them be among the AI-enabled so they can succeed and thrive.”

On launching in Europe vs. Silicon Valley: While netting a big-time Silicon Valley investor is still a big mark of success for European startups, Liautaud said “the model is evolving.”

“We’ve seen a few European companies managing to be global leaders out of Europe,” he said, pointing to Spotify and Revolut as examples.

When you start in Europe, “you’re going to expand internationally,” including in the US, he said. But instead of moving to the US and building a management team there, companies are increasingly staying put. “You’re going to attract maybe Americans or others to build your team in Europe,” he said, “and you’re going to continue to develop your capital infrastructure with global money.”

“Now we’re starting to create a virtuous circle, where the money and the talent will get reinvested in the same place,” he said.

On funding trends: Funders’ appetite for backing new projects is “growing rapidly,” Taylor said, noting that the platform itself draws in “people that are just going to want to support new things.” As a result, he said, “60, 70, 80% of the funding comes from organically on the platform.”

New projects abound when the economy is uncertain, he said: “When there’s tough macroeconomic times, people tend to get a lot more creative.” And many people would rather be creators and entrepreneurs than work a traditional 9-to-5, he added.

The definition of a successful project has changed, too, Taylor said. In China, for example, a $1 million campaign used to be considered successful, he said; that bar is now up to $5 million.

On Kickstarter’s culture: The company has a four-day workweek, a “wall-to-wall” union, and a fully remote work policy, Taylor said, but noted that “a four-day workweek, if you don’t manage it well, can burn you out even more because you’re trying to fit so much more in a condensed week.”

How tariffs could affect startups and their investors: “It’s harder to make the investments if you don’t know the foundation that you’re building on is actually going to be stable,” Prince said. “Predictability is what you really need in an investing environment.”

On AI changing the game for content: Thanks to AI, “we’re going to be in a world where more and more questions are getting answered without you having to go to the original source,” Prince said. The resulting reduction in ad traction and content monetization means “there has to be a new business model to exist for those original content creators,” he said. “And I think that that is incredibly terrifying to a lot of the publishing industry today.”

Prince described his “utopian vision for the future”: “Humans should get back to getting content for free, and robots should pay a ton for it.”

On the intersection of AI and cybersecurity: Prince predicts that AI will make the web more secure. “Our machine learning systems take the feed of data of all of the traffic that flows through Cloudflare’s network,” he explained, “and are now surfacing new cyber attacks and threats that no human has ever identified before.”

On regulating AI: “Most of the time, as technology advances, it becomes more predictable,” Prince said. “AI is, by its very design, designed to be nondeterministic. And what that means is that it is very, very difficult to regulate outputs.”

On the AI race: AI’s unpredictability puts China at a disadvantage versus the US, he added. Beijing “won’t tolerate [AI systems] criticizing the government… that’s always going to make it much more difficult to have real innovation over the long term.”

How tariffs could affect startups: The tariffs have “created greater uncertainty, created volatility, and in some sectors starting to increase cost,” Ferguson said. “All three of those things are a little bit of a problem for startups and smaller companies.”

On how Washington should regulate AI: “First, don’t rush,” said Ferguson, a former Fed regulator. “There are risks [of] going too fast, risks [of] going too slow, and most importantly, I think, there’s a risk of overregulating before we know exactly what the dangers are.”

“It’s going to be hard to regulate knowledge; it’s going to be hard to regulate models per se,” he added. “Where you might be able to regulate is the interface between the model and the human being.”

On the state of security risks: Verizon’s 2025 data breach investigations report showed that third-party cybersecurity risk for companies has doubled. “Most organizations today rely on probably not just one, but maybe a dozen — or, depending on the size of the organization, maybe even hundreds — of third parties,” he said. “What we find is that that introduces another level of risk that a lot of organizations just haven’t fully cared for.”

On the risks security firms are seeing: The crypto industry is used to the risk of theft, and companies are “very stress-tested” for ransomware attacks, but it’s a lot tougher to guard against risks posed by actual people as opposed to AI, Richter said.

“The incentives for a long-term [heist] strategy here are very high,” he said, and in a world where open-source software is increasingly common, it’s tough to “filter out who are really the people that are building code for good and who are the ones that are more tricky.”

On the prospect of US crypto regulation passing: Richter, who said he was in Washington all day and had met with people from the Treasury Department and the Senate, said he feels “very, very good.”

He stressed the importance of regulating the industry. “We need to start with just having rules. I don’t even care if they’re bad rules, but they just need to be applied consistently,” Richter said. “I think the first batch of rules is going to be good enough” but added that “we’re going to need a couple of iterations.”

On tariffs’ market impact: “It has caused a lot of attention, and there has been a very volatile market because of it,” Moore said. “If we can signal to the American worker and family that you’re going to have sound, pro-growth tax policy for the foreseeable, that should be able to give a lot of confidence to the market.”

On raising the debt ceiling: “Minority Leader [Chuck] Schumer would require massive spending increases or concessions in order to do a bipartisan bill that would increase the debt ceiling,” Moore said. He noted that some conservative members have promised they’d never vote to raise the limit, “but if you’re coupling it with smart spending reform, we should be able to get over this hurdle.”

On making tips tax-free: “No tax on tips is a large priority for the administration — President [Donald] Trump talks about it a lot. He’s made commitments to it, and we want to be able to help deliver this for him,” Moore said.