Both President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are reportedly looking for ways to ease the trade war between the two countries.

But with tariffs in effect around the world, corporate leaders are raising serious concerns about the ongoing tension and uncertainty already created.

Many are now asking the White House to reconsider new tariffs that are set to come into play next month.

Earlier this week, the CEOs of Walmart and Target reportedly warned the president there could be empty shelves within weeks.

To get more of a sense of how businesses are reacting, I spoke earlier with Rich Lesser.

He's the global chair of Boston Consulting Group who works with CEOs of major companies.

Rich Lesser, welcome to the NewsHour. Thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure.

So you have been meeting with and convening groups of CEOs, not just around the country, but really around the world, to talk about how they are navigating this moment.

What did they tell you behind closed doors about their concerns and how they're approaching this moment?

Yeah, it's very interesting. Of course, the start of those conversations is always about the high level stuff, the general economic forecast, inflation, GDP, all that sort of stuff. But then when you get beyond that, you typically get into three different kinds of topics.

The first topic is just uncertainty.

I mean, the tariffs are a challenge, and there's been a lot written and discussed about

that.

But what's even more challenging is not knowing where they're going to land.

And that makes it harder to want to invest. You might want to

invest, but it makes it harder to know how and when to invest, whether it's doing deals or

adding manufacturing assets or building infrastructure. And so the uncertainty is the first topic.

I think the second is many people want to come to the U.S. and to build, and that's been true,

even leading up to the inauguration. I heard that quite frequently. I think the workforce

issues are a real challenge. Many of the towns that the president rightly identified as having

been decimated by what's happened over the last few decades, those people have left

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