Opening Remarks for FIA Forum: Commodities 2024, Panel Discussion on the 2025 Outlook
It’s great to be back at the FIA Commodities Forum. For those I haven’t met, my name is Sam Schulhofer-Wohl. I’m senior vice president and senior advisor to the president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and I’m excited to moderate this panel on the outlook for 2025.
As moderator, my role is to make sure we have a lively conversation filled with insights from our panelists. I won’t be offering my own perspectives, particularly because the Fed is in a communications blackout period related to today’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
While we at the Fed don’t communicate our own economic views during blackout, we continue the critical work of gathering information from market participants, businesses and communities.
We’re grateful to all who share their perspectives with us—including a number of you here in this room. These insights help the Fed make the best decisions to serve the American people.
I’ll take today’s panel in the spirit of that ongoing information-gathering. So if you see me smile, nod, frown, grimace or react in any other way to anything anyone says, please know that I’m merely expressing appreciation for the speaker’s willingness to share. I’m not commenting in any way on the views expressed.
I’d now like to very briefly introduce our distinguished panelists:
- Summer Mersinger, commissioner with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
- J.C. Kneale, vice president of U.S. natural gas, power and NGL markets at ICE.
- Dylan Seff, head of utilities and sustainable energy for the Americas at Vitol.
- And Will Shappley, vice president for structured solutions and strategic origination - gas and power trading Americas at BP Energy.
Unless a speaker notes otherwise, we each speak only for ourselves and not for any organization we belong to.
And now for the fun part – the commodities outlook for 2025. I have a few questions for the panelists. We also welcome all of you in the audience to join the conversation. Throughout this session, the screens in the room will display QR codes you can scan with your phones to submit anonymous questions, and I’ll do my best to incorporate them.
While we wait for those questions to roll in, let’s start with the energy transition. It’s been a focus of market and policy debate in recent years. Dylan, what do you expect for 2025?
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