IBES 2023 Speaker Videos Now Available

General session recordings and workshop and breakout materials from the CFC Independent Borrowers Executive Summit (IBES) 2023 are available on the CFC Member Website. Visitors must have a Member Website account to log in and access the videos. Those who do not have an account for the CFC Member Website can create an account by visiting the Member Website Login page and clicking the Request Account link at the top of the page.

2023 IBES Scrapbook

Tom Porcelli (left), chief U.S. economist for PGIM Fixed Income, and Steve Ricchiuto (center), managing director and chief economist for Mizuho Securities USA, joined CFC CEO Andrew Don (right) to share their economic views from Wall Street. “I still have a recession in the forecast, which is unlike most of the people who do what I do for a living,” Ricchiuto said. “They’ve all been co-opted by the soft-landing scenario. I believe inflation is going to be stickier than the Federal Reserve anticipates, and therefore higher for the longer approach; everyone’s agreeing on the longer. I still believe longer is necessary, and I’m not sure higher is out of the question.”

David Feherty (left), former professional golfer, golf analyst, PGA announcer and host of “Feherty,” joined Shane Larson (right), CEO for Rock Energy Cooperative and CFC District 5 director, for a conversation about life as a golfer and commentator, along with the struggles of depression and the fulfillment of aiding seriously injured U.S. troops. “Your sense of humor is the last defense of the human soul,” Feherty said. “You know where it’s born out of adversity. If somebody can find something that’s amusing about their situation, it helps. It always helps, no matter how dire that situation is. I don’t think you have the right to laugh at anybody else if you can’t laugh at yourself.”

Dr. Mark Esper (left), 27th U.S. Secretary of Defense, joined Steve Brame (right), CEO for Allegheny Electric Cooperative and Pennsylvania Rural Electric Association, to discuss the geopolitical landscape, trends and the global issues that impact the electric industry. “One of the things we should realize about the competition that’s now underway with China is—we realized this during the height of COVID when we found that our supply lines were broken…we can’t rely on China anymore,” Esper said. “In fact, we’ve got to be careful about all of our supply lines, but particularly the Chinese. We need to aim for self-sufficiency in critical areas. Energy is one of them.”

Energy Strategist Peter Zeihan closed out CFC IBES 2023 by sharing his perspectives on the future of global energy. “Every generation or two, our political system reshuffles itself as the factions move around based on changes in geopolitics, technology and demographics,” Zeihan said. “If you think back on the last 35 years, we’ve had the rise of the baby boomers and their retirement, the start of hyper globalization and now its collapse, or the onset of social media and the information revolution. We are going to run our political system differently, but it takes six to 12 years to do the shakeout and the rearrangement. We’re only in year six now. We have at least one more presidential cycle to go through. Until then, everything that you need to do, expanding capacity by half, has to be done into the teeth of this.”