CFOs have a reputation for control and caution. Some people think their role is to torpedo ideas and tell department heads there isn’t enough money for what they want to do, and to stay within their budget.

While there may be a little truth to that—people who don’t exercise financial restraint won’t become CFOs—decision-making is much more nuanced. In order not to be seen as your company’s chief naysayer, though, CFOs should consider a more transparent decision-making process. Evan Goldstein, CFO at sales enablement platform Seismic, has earned himself the reputation of being a team player who listens—even though he does say no. I spoke with him about how to turn around your company’s perception of the CFO, and an excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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If you look at gas prices, inflation and consumer spending, it’s easy to see the economic impact of the Iran war. But if you look at the stock market, it’s almost as if there hasn’t been a war at all. Last week, major indexes closed at record-breaking highs for days: The Nasdaq ended Friday with its 13th consecutive day of growth—the longest streak since 2009. The rally ended Monday, after the U.S. seized an Iranian cargo ship that tried to make it through the U.S. blockade.

At the Semafor World Economy conference last week in Washington, D.C., two top officials who served past Democratic presidents—Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Joe Biden’s Senior Advisor for Energy and Investment Amos Hochstein—spoke about the gap between markets and reality. Rubin, who worked at Goldman Sachs before joining the Clinton administration, said there have been other periods during which Wall Street was out of sync with Main Street. For two years leading up to the 1987 stock market crash, Rubin said, the markets were climbing—up until October 19, when the S&P 500 saw its largest ever one-day crash, falling 22.6%.

Hochstein added that traders have the perpetual goal of improving stock valuations. Therefore, if the president says the war’s about to end—something President Donald Trump has said since the first days of the war—taking him at his word is good for valuations. The long-term risks of the war and its impact on companies are never fully considered.

But that could also change rather quickly, Hochstein and Rubin said. If airports in Asia and Europe run out of jet fuel and have to cancel flights, kinks in the supply chain make medical procedures like MRIs prohibitively expensive, or prices go up because manufacturers cannot make bathroom fixtures, the economic issues will come to Wall Street to roost.

But no matter what happens in the war, Rubin said the current government isn’t using a coherent process to make decisions, and that could impact the U.S.’s credibility in the global economy for years to come. He said the U.S. has “an authoritarian figure who operates at extremes, way outside the range of anything we ever debate in this country.”

“I don’t think markets or........

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