America’s chief executives finally seem to have got the message about President Trump. There is little benefit in trying to maintain sweet relations with a president whose ability to deliver tax cuts is fading by the day. But there is real reputational risk in being the last corporate suit still lending him support.

With the bosses resigning in droves from Trump’s two advisory councils, the president was obliged to take matters into his own hands by disbanding both panels. This was done to relieve “pressure” on the business people, he tweeted. But the way events were running, there would have been nobody left by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, Trump’s power to move companies’ share prices seems to have evaporated. Amazon is “doing great damage to tax paying retailers”, tweeted the president in the morning, but investors no longer care what he thinks about individual companies. Some $5bn was wiped off Amazon’s stock market value after the tweet, but the sum was quickly wiped on again. We may soon be at a point where being the target of an angry presidential tweet is good for a stock price.

It is hard, though, to think that a breakdown in relations between corporate America and the president can be good news for the wider stock market. Sooner or later, the damage to confidence will affect real business decisions, and the process may now be starting. Corporate America is saying Trump is a sell.

If only Balfour Beatty turnaround model could work for Carillion

Balfour Beatty is turning into an impressive turnaround story. After issuing six profits warnings between 2012 and 2015, the construction firm is showing that even supposedly toxic problems can be washed out of the system with the help of time and common sense.

Leo Quinn arrived as chief executive at the start of 2015 to implement his derisking plans and Wednesday’s half-year results delivered the clearest improvement so far. Underlying profits from operations of £39m doesn’t sound like a healthy return on £4bn of revenues but Quinn is now predicting “industry standard margins” – which means about 2.5% – in the second half of next year. Over a full year, that might mean profits of £200m. The shares rose 6% and are now back to something close to pre-crisis levels.

Should shareholders in Carillion, in despair after last month’s horrible profits warning, enormous £845m provision and disposal of the chief executive, take heart? Does Balfour’s recovery provide a model for how to proceed?

Only in one respect: better risk management is obviously the way to go, but that has always been true in construction. Sadly, however, there is a fundamental difference between Balfour’s crisis circa 2015 and Carillion’s of today. It is the balance sheet. Balfour’s was never broken but Carillion’s is.

Balfour’s salvation was an investment portfolio of student accommodation, hospitals and so forth, worth £1bn (and now worth £1.23bn). That solidity made a rights issue avoidable and allowed Quinn to go about his derisking work without short-term pressures.

Carillion, by contrast, has a much smaller investment portfolio and is towing a much bigger pension fund deficit, £587m at the last count, plus borrowings that averaged £695m in the first half of this year. For a company whose stock market value has collapsed to £225m, there is no easy escape. A thumping rights issue, or even a debt-for-equity swap, looks inevitable.

Carillion’s stand-in boss Keith Cochrane will reveal his self-help plan next month. He can rule out a despairing appeal to Balfour to ride to the rescue with a bid. Carillion’s opportunistic attempt to buy Balfour in 2014 was a monumental act of hubris, we now know. Quinn, it is safe to assume, has zero appetite to attempt the takeover trick in reverse.

PwC’s £5m fine may be small change if BT inquiry goes against it

Why does it always seem to be PricewaterhouseCoopers? The accounting outfit has broken its own record for the size of its audit-related fine from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). It has copped a £5.1m penalty for “extensive misconduct” in the auditing of finance firm RSM Tenon. That is slightly more than the £5m whack in May for its work at social housing group Connaught.

Still, PwC found out the following month that it is in the clear at Tesco, where the FRC closed its investigation in the wake of the supermarket chain’s profits overstatement. But one big inquiry is outstanding – into the Italian job at BT, where PwC was the auditor. The outcome is keenly awaited. An adverse finding at a FTSE 100 company would put the other penalties in the shade.