Markets Wired

WASHINGTON — Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo, the highest-ranking Nigerian American in the Biden-Harris Administration, traveled to Lagos, Nigeria on September 17 – 19 and New York, NY on September 20 to further the U.S. – Nigeria economic relationship. While in Lagos, the Deputy Secretary met with Nigerian entrepreneurs, creators, business leaders and students to discuss how the United States can be a partner in unlocking investment and opportunity for the country and on the continent.

In remarks at the Lagos Business School, the Deputy Secretary outlined the case for four priorities for economic reform to spur the type of growth that creates economic opportunity for the Nigerian people: a stable Naira, a fiscal strategy that will provide resources for critical investments in infrastructure and social services, rooting out corruption, and protecting the integrity of Nigeria’s financial system. He shared the many reasons why the United States is committed to the partnership with Nigeria, including people-to-people relationships, shared democratic values, and common economic and security interests.

Before departing for Nigeria, the Deputy Secretary hosted a roundtable with U.S. businesses that operate in Nigeria to hear about the local challenges and growth opportunities they face. In Lagos, he continued that conversation with U.S. companies in country, where he heard about the importance of measures to address security issues and combat corruption.

Nigeria’s creative sector is a bright spot for growth and investment, from Nollywood films to Afrobeats music heard around the world. With three in five Nigerians under the age of 25, addressing issues that matter to young people is critical to taking advantage of Nigeria’s “demographic dividend.” The Deputy Secretary hosted a dinner to gain perspective on these topics with leading Nigerian creators such as Bukunmi Adeaga-Ilori (Kie Kie), comedian and actor Bright Okpocha (Basketmouth) and actress Jemima Osunde at Alara, a fashion concept store that currently has a pop-up exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City.

With over 80% of Nigerians employed by micro, small, or medium sized businesses, the Deputy Secretary also met with entrepreneurs at Vibranium Valley, a tech campus run by incubator Venture Garden Group, and toured the ReelFruit factory, a woman-owned fruit snack startup that has received seed funding from USAID to grow and scale their operations.

At the conclusion of the trip, Deputy Secretary Adeyemo traveled to New York to meet with senior Nigerian officials, including His Excellency President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Wale Edun on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. They discussed the macroeconomic challenges Nigeria faces and the tremendous potential for private sector driven economic growth. Deputy Secretary Adeyemo then joined President Tinubu at a round table hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with U.S. and Nigerian businesses and leaders.

Click here to view photos from the trip. Photo credit: U.S. Consulate Lagos.

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As Prepared for Delivery

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the first U.S. Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment Investor Forum. And to Secretary Blinken for his introductory remarks. I’m also glad to be here alongside President Banga, who has been leading so much crucial work.

When President Biden and the G7 launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment last June, they set a target of mobilizing $600 billion for global infrastructure investments over five years. The United States plans to mobilize one-third of that, or $200 billion. Alongside financial resources, the Treasury Department is working to accelerate the delivery of transformative infrastructure projects, through this Partnership, as well as through Just Energy Transition Partnerships and our broader work on evolving the multilateral development banks. The projects that result will fuel the energy transition, provide basic services, and drive sustainable and inclusive growth.

This is because infrastructure provides an excellent return on investment. A 2021 meta-study by the Global Infrastructure Hub found that every dollar invested in infrastructure produces a 150% return in economic output, after two to five years. And a large body of evidence shows that infrastructure investment increases productivity, benefitting both firms and households. When done right, infrastructure investment raises long-term growth and increases social inclusivity.

Return on investment is one reason we’re focused on quality infrastructure. With many countries facing fiscal constraints, every dollar—or peso, rand, or rupee—counts. We need projects that meet the most pressing needs of our partners over the long term. And we need projects that respect environmental, social and technical standards, including having buy-in from local communities.

We are partnering with governments in need of investment to create the right policy environments. This a core tenet, for example, of the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs. In the Indonesia JETP, Treasury is working with a network of banks to identify policy barriers to private investment and discuss solutions with the Government of Indonesia that would unlock significant amounts of private investment in Indonesia’s energy transition.

And Treasury is also working to tackle other barriers to investment. We know that the lack of investment-ready projects is a challenge, so we are seeking to increase funding for project preparation. We’ve also been helping to play a matchmaking role between governments, investors, and the opportunities we and others identify. We’re seeing exciting opportunities. PGI partners are hard at work on the Trans-African Corridor, and on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which was announced just this month at the G20 Summit.

The multilateral development banks also have a crucial role to play in supporting policy change, providing risk mitigation instruments, and developing bankable projects. This is one of Treasury’s priorities in our ongoing work to evolve the multilateral development banks. Last year, I asked the MDBs to set ambitious private capital mobilization targets and to implement consistent data reporting to track their progress and speed up adoption of impactful solutions. We are also asking the MDBs to assess their operating and financing models for opportunities to enhance mobilization, and to align staff incentives to reward interventions that increase private investment. We are looking forward to the results of President Banga’s Private Sector Investment Lab, which will help us identify “what works” for achieving better integration between the MDBs and private investors. And at the upcoming Annual Meetings, I expect to endorse a robust package of reforms that will embed addressing global challenges into the institution’s DNA and further increase its ability to make investments in infrastructure that boosts countries’ resilience.

As Secretary Blinken highlighted, convenings like today’s roundtable are an important way for public and private leaders with diverse perspectives to exchange feedback. I previously met with members of the Investor Leadership Network in Paris in June, and I look forward to upcoming meetings with public and private partners. Today, we hope to discuss not only what the opportunities and challenges are but also how you’re approaching them and how we can further support you. The power of these convenings is when they lead to renewed commitment and action. We should determine where exactly we’re making progress, where the gaps are, and how to drive more progress.

Thank you again for being here, and I look forward to your thoughts.

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As Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon and thanks for having me here today. The topic of today’s forum – the resilience of Treasury markets – is a topic that we at the Treasury Department care deeply about and accordingly spend a great deal of time focused on. And the title of today’s forum – “The Path to Resilient Treasury Markets” – seems exactly right to me. The use of the word “path” reminds me of the efforts undertaken over most of the past decade. Resilient Treasury markets are not a static endpoint; they are a journey towards a shared goal and responsibility of the Treasury, the broader official sector, and market participants.

Over the last few years, Treasury and our colleagues in the Inter-Agency Working Group on Treasury Market Surveillance, or IAWG, have made significant progress in developing policies that would help make the Treasury market more resilient, but there is still much work to be done. And as the structure of the market evolves, our policies will need to evolve as well. Venues like today’s forum are important opportunities for the official sector and market participants to discuss progress and share insights on the best paths forward.

While IAWG members continue to consider a wide range of policies to help make the Treasury markets more resilient, my remarks today will focus on one: buybacks. After careful consideration, we decided it was prudent to move forward and announced our intentions at the May refunding to implement a regular buyback program next year.¹  We believe buybacks can play an important role in helping to make the Treasury market more liquid and resilient by providing liquidity support. The buyback program will also help Treasury to better achieve our debt management objectives. Before delving into our upcoming plans, I will first briefly discuss Treasury’s recent history with buybacks.

The last time Treasury conducted a regular buyback program was in the early 2000s, ending in April 2002. To understand why these buybacks were conducted, it’s important to review what was happening with Treasury auction sizes leading up to those purchases. Due to shrinking budget deficits and eventual surpluses in the 1990s, Treasury significantly reduced offering sizes of the 2- and 3-year notes between 1996 and 1998. As the outstanding sizes of these issues continued to shrink, on-the-run liquidity was hindered. This led to concerns of lower auction demand and therefore higher financing costs for Treasury. Market observers at the time cautioned that Treasury securities were at risk of losing “benchmark status” because the auction sizes were becoming too small. To delay shrinking new issue sizes further, in 1998, Treasury discontinued the 3-year offering and changed the 5-year offering from monthly to quarterly. Another consequence of these smaller short- and intermediate-term offerings, however, was an unintended increase in the average maturity of debt outstanding, as long-term debt remained outstanding. At the time, this was considered potentially costly for Treasury, based on the assumption that the yield curve is typically positively sloped.

Since budget surpluses were expected to persist into the foreseeable future, at the end of the 1990s Treasury began exploring options to address concerns regarding shrinking auction sizes, including using buybacks to maintain larger new issue sizes. After careful consideration of a range of options, including recommendations from the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, or TBAC, Treasury adopted a final rule on buybacks in January 2000. At the time of adoption, then-Treasury Secretary Summers noted several advantages of buybacks, including (1) “to enhance liquidity of benchmark securities”, (2) “to prevent what would otherwise be a potentially costly and unjustified increase in the average maturity of our debt”, and (3) “more effective use of excess cash”.²  Between March 2000 and April 2002, Treasury conducted 45 buyback operations, buying back a total of $67.5 billion of outstanding debt. The first 42 operations were intended to address concerns related to shrinking auction sizes. However, as budget surpluses disappeared, in April 2002 the last three buyback operations were aimed at lowering high seasonal cash balances. 

While Treasury has conducted limited small-value buybacks each year for most of the past decade to test operational capabilities and has always considered them as part of our debt management toolkit, it has been a little over 20 years since we last conducted buybacks in meaningful size. So why the change? Why reintroduce buybacks now?

First, a buyback program in the Treasury market would not be unique. Many sovereign debt management offices around the world use them to achieve various objectives. A 2022 OECD survey of nearly 40 sovereign DMOs indicated that a majority of the respondents conduct buybacks or switches (that is, exchanges of one security for another).³  Additionally, there have been a handful of studies suggesting there are both liquidity and cash management benefits of conducting buybacks, even when there are budget deficits.⁴  Finally, we have received a significant amount of feedback over the years, including from the TBAC, the primary dealers, and other market participants, supportive of a regular buyback program.

We have two objectives for our upcoming buyback program: liquidity support and cash management. Before expanding on these, let me be clear on what this program is not intended for. First, we do not intend to conduct tactical or ad-hoc operations; instead, buybacks will be conducted in a regular and predictable manner. Second, we do not intend to use buybacks to change the maturity profile of our debt outstanding. Our issuance strategy remains our primary tool for adjusting the maturity profile, if desired, and we plan to limit the size of our buyback operations and conduct operations across the curve. And third, buybacks are not intended to address acute periods of market stress – I’ll come back to this in a moment.

As I noted, the first objective of our buyback program is liquidity support. We believe buybacks can help improve the liquidity of the Treasury market by providing a regular opportunity for market participants to sell back to Treasury off-the-run securities across the yield curve. This should improve the willingness of investors and intermediaries to trade and provide liquidity in these securities, all else equal, knowing there is a potential outlet to sell some of their off-the-run holdings. These operations can also make intermediation capacity more readily available by Treasury purchasing hard-to-move securities that are in broker-dealer inventories and use up their intermediation capacity. With more intermediation capacity readily available, the Treasury market should see improved functioning in normal times and have an enhanced ability to absorb larger flows. 

While we believe it is important that we retain some flexibility in providing incremental liquidity support to certain sectors of the Treasury market, it is important we make it clear at the outset that these buybacks are not intended to ameliorate periods of acute market stress. Unlike the Federal Reserve System, which can finance purchases of securities by creating reserves, each dollar of buybacks needs to be financed with a dollar of Treasury issuance, all else equal. This limits our ability to rapidly increase the size of buybacks to a level potentially necessary to alleviate market stress without resulting in significant costs for the taxpayer, as a corresponding rapid rise in Treasury issuance could materially increase our financing costs during these periods.

The second objective of our buyback program is cash management. We believe buybacks can improve our cash management by reducing the volatility in our cash balance and bill issuance in two ways. First, during periods of high tax receipts, our cash balance typically rises meaningfully, and we try to offset some of this rise by making significant reductions in bill issuance. This volatility can be costly to the taxpayer by causing imbalances between supply and demand and by potentially hindering the smooth functioning of the bill market. Conducting buybacks during these periods could help reduce some of this volatility. Second, we plan to focus cash management buybacks on purchasing securities with maturity dates around periods of large outflows, which could also reduce this volatility. These buybacks could mitigate the need to raise extra cash through bill issuance to prepare for such periods. 

Operationally, both liquidity support and cash management buybacks will be executed by our fiscal agent, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, via the same trading platform that they have used for the past 17 years to conduct their purchases of Treasury securities. While the goals of our buyback program are quite different from the goals of the Federal Reserve System’s prior Treasury securities purchase programs, the actual operations should be familiar to market participants because many of the design parameters are similar. However, an important difference is that we intend to be more price sensitive in selecting the buyback offers to accept. Because we are not targeting a fixed quantity to purchase, we believe it is important to only buy back securities that help us meet our objectives and to only execute at attractive prices. As a result, the amount we buy during any given operation might be materially lower than the maximum amount announced. The amount that we buy will be closely tied to the quality of the offers we receive.

To measure the success of the buyback program, we plan to utilize both quantitative and qualitative measures; there is no single measure that we plan to rely on. For liquidity support buybacks, while we hope to see some improvement across liquidity metrics over time, we recognize there are many other factors that may affect liquidity at any given moment, such as market volatility. It has also been a while since we last conducted regular buyback operations; as such, our understanding of the effects of buybacks will improve as we conduct more operations and have additional data for analysis. We are confident that the operational design parameters we have communicated thus far are a good starting point, but over time we may need to make some adjustments to better achieve our objectives.⁵

Turning to one last question on buybacks: how should they be financed? We plan to treat the increase in our borrowing needs due to buybacks the same way that we treat other outlays. Moreover, we think it would be imprudent to try to replace the interest rate risk that buybacks remove from a certain maturity sector in the market by precisely offsetting them with issuance of an equivalent amount of on-the-run Treasury securities in the same maturity sector. Attempts to do so would unnecessarily limit the flexibility of our issuance strategy and run counter to regular and predictable issuance. When evaluating how buybacks affect our issuance plans, we will continue to look at our borrowing needs in totality in the short-, intermediate-, and long-term and make issuance adjustments based on what we believe is the appropriate mix of coupon and bill issuance. Unexpected short-term changes in borrowing needs will still largely be addressed with changes in bill issuance. 

Before I conclude, I wanted to close with a few words about recent debt management decisions. Since the suspension of the debt limit in early June, we have substantially increased gross issuance, both to rebuild the Treasury General Account from very low levels and to continue to meet the government’s ongoing borrowing needs. Nearly all of this increase has been in Treasury bills, where more than $1 trillion of increased supply has been absorbed well. The total supply of bills now exceeds $5.2 trillion, which represents just over 20 percent of marketable Treasury debt outstanding.

While bill supply is likely to remain above 20 percent for some time, our intention is to gradually increase coupon issuance to better align auction sizes with intermediate- to long-term borrowing needs, and as I outlined at the August refunding, we expect that further gradual increases in coupon auctions sizes will likely be necessary in future quarters. The TBAC has supported this approach, recommending at its August meeting that considering the scale and uncertainty of projected borrowing needs, the amount of bills as a share of total marketable debt outstanding should deviate from TBAC’s recommended 15-20 percent range for some time.

Treasury will continue to follow its longstanding “regular and predictable” approach to issuance and continue to use our quarterly refunding statements to provide updates on future changes to borrowing needs and issuance. Our approach will continue to depend on a variety of factors, including the evolution of the fiscal outlook and the pace and duration of future redemptions from the Federal Reserve’s SOMA portfolio. 

In conclusion, I am hopeful that the upcoming regular buyback program will become an important feature of the Treasury market, improving liquidity and helping Treasury meet our debt management objectives. The feedback we have received to date from a wide variety of market participants has been tremendously helpful and will continue to be important as we further refine the operational design parameters of the program ahead of and after our planned 2024 launch. Enhancing the resilience of the Treasury market remains a top priority of the official sector, and I look forward to the rest of today’s discussion on ways to ensure that the Treasury market remains the deepest and most liquid market in the world. Thank you.

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_{1. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1460}

_{2. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ls330}

_{3. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/62c91ab0-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/62c91ab0-en} 

_{4. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr304.pdf and https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-12-314.pdf}

_{5. For a more detailed discussion of design issues, see https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/221/TreasurySupplementalQRQ22023.pdf and https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/221/TreasurySupplementalQRQ32023.pdf} 

NEW YORK – Today, Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen met with Brazil’s Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. During their meeting, Secretary Yellen and Minister Haddad discussed the macroeconomic outlook as well as areas for additional cooperation between the two countries, including on climate related issues and strengthening the international financial architecture. Secretary Yellen also expressed U.S. support for Brazil’s upcoming G20 presidency. 

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As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you, Chrystia, for your kind words and your leadership. And thank you to the Atlantic Council. I am honored to receive this award – and to be among such distinguished fellow recipients.  

When I was born, the world was still recovering from the devastation of the Great Depression and the Second World War. From the rubble of these crises, the United States and many other countries charted a post-war course premised on a conviction: that each nation’s stability and growth depended on our collective security and prosperity.  

This is equally if not more true today. I took office in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, which underscored just how interconnected we all are. From the beginning of the Administration, we made clear that American isolationism and retrenchment were over. And we set forth a new guiding principle: America is strongest when we engage with the world. As my nation’s chief economic diplomat, I have since worked to faithfully apply that principle.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, we witnessed the determination of the Ukrainian people as they fought for their lives and freedom, and for the values we all share. And we knew we had to support them with a decisive response. As we look back on the past year and a half of the war, it’s clear that many of our actions so far would have been impossible to undertake if any country were attempting them alone. Our unprecedented multilateral sanctions regime and novel price cap on Russian oil exports are effective in pressuring Russia only because we acted as a global coalition. And I believe the global economy is in a better place than many of us thought it would be a year ago due to our collective actions. This commitment to multilateralism should drive our continued efforts to exert more pressure on Russia to end its unjust war, and to support the Ukrainian people. And it should shape our actions in crises to come. 

Robust engagement with the world is not confined to moments of crisis, however. It’s required, for example, to hold off the steady march of climate change, which is affecting communities across America and around the world. To invest in a global health system that can prevent and withstand the next pandemic, avoiding the immense human toll and economic damage like that we saw from COVID-19. To create a fairer international tax system that ends a race to the bottom and benefits working people around the world. So, we’ve helped lead efforts to establish a pandemic fund and to align over 130 countries on a global minimum tax. We’ve put forward a new vision for development in the 21st century focused on global challenges and collaborated with others to evolve the multilateral development banks to make good on it. We’re also working to stabilize relations with China by seeking a healthy economic relationship that benefits both sides and enables cooperation on global challenges, while protecting our vital national security interests. In sum, we’ve engaged with the world, including through committed coalition-building, and with a view to building the global economy we need for the long term.

In today’s world, we’re in it together. And we have to go at it together if we want to make our nations and the world safer, healthier, and more prosperous. Thank you again for this honor. I look forward to the collective work ahead of us.

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As Prepared for Delivery

Prime Minister Chinh, I’m very glad we are meeting here in New York again after my visit to Hanoi in July.

As I said to you this summer, I care deeply about further improving our bilateral economic relationship.

Indeed, just earlier this month, President Biden and General Secretary Trong took the historic step of upgrading the United States–Vietnam relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

This reflects the remarkable strides in our mutual understanding and trust in recent years and underscores our commitment to deepening cooperation in the years to come. It also presents new opportunities to jointly promote innovation-driven inclusive economic growth.

Since we normalized relations in 1995, Vietnam has become a close economic partner, with our two-way trade reaching record highs last year and the United States serving as Vietnam’s largest export market.

The Biden-Harris Administration views Vietnam as a key partner in our “friendshoring” approach to deepen integration with a broad set of partners and allies to create diverse, resilient, and sustainable supply chains in key industries. We are encouraged by the growing investments that companies are making in Vietnam and recognize Vietnam’s tremendous potential as a major player in the semiconductor industry.

I also welcome your leadership on the clean energy transition. Along with my International Partners Group colleagues, I have been heartened to see momentum towards developing a Resource Mobilization Plan under the Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JETP. I look forward to talking more about Vietnam’s path forward.

Thank you

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NEW YORK – Today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang, and Climate Counselor Ethan Zindler, met with leadership from philanthropies that support the implementation of financial institution net-zero commitments and related transition planning efforts. The discussion centered on current priorities and outstanding challenges to mobilizing private finance towards the growing clean energy economy of the future. Alongside today’s events, these philanthropic leaders – alongside another philanthropic organization not present (Hewlett Foundation) – announced commitments totaling $340 million over the next 3 years. These funds will be used to support the continued development of research, data availability, and technical resources intended to help financial institutions develop and execute robust, voluntary net-zero commitments. This funding will also support work to facilitate the transition planning efforts of non-financial sectors of the economy. Earlier in the day Treasury released its Net-Zero Principles for Financing & Investment.

Attendees present included representatives from Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Climate Arc, ClimateWorks Foundation, and Sequoia Climate Foundation.

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NEW YORK – Today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang, and Climate Counselor Ethan Zindler, met with leaders of some of the largest technical non-governmental organizations (NGOs) focused on supporting the implementation of net-zero commitments by financial institutions and facilitating the transition to a clean energy economy. Participants discussed the importance of promoting consistency among voluntary standards and best practices for net-zero transition plans, and identified gaps in available data and technical resources and priorities for future work.  In addition, some of these technical NGO leaders announced new commitments to develop further technical work to support financial institutions in developing and implementing net-zero transition plans and related efforts. Earlier in the day Treasury released its Net-Zero Principles for Financing & Investment.

Attendees present included representatives from Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), Ceres, Climate Policy Institute (CPI), E3G, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), and World Wildlife Foundation (WWF).
 

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NEW YORK – Today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang, and Climate Counselor Ethan Zindler met with leaders from a range of financial institutions.  The discussion focused on voluntary best practices and challenges related to developing and implementing net-zero commitments, supporting client and portfolio company transition-related efforts, and mobilizing additional private finance towards the clean energy economy. Earlier in the day Treasury released its Net-Zero Principles for Financing & Investment. 

Attendees present included representatives from Amalgamated Bank, BlackRock, Citigroup, Energy Impact Partners, HSBC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR), Neuberger Berman, New York State Common Retirement Fund, RockCreek, and Wellington Management Company.

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As Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon. It’s nice to see many of you again.

I’d like to start by expressing my appreciation for the work you and your firms are doing on climate – particularly the support you provide to your clients and portfolio companies to both better manage the risks and take advantage of the opportunities associated with climate change. The steps you’ve been taking are significant.

But there remains much work to be done, and now is the time for all of us to build on progress made and continue advancing our climate-related work.

Later today, I’ll give remarks on the release of Treasury’s Principles for Net-Zero Financing and Investment, which we have just published. These Principles lay out best practices for financial institutions that have made or are thinking about making net-zero commitments.

Following the Principles is, of course, voluntary, but many of those in this room are taking or have already taken actions consistent with some of the best practices they highlight. And for those that haven’t, we think they can be useful in clarifying what to consider.

We know that every financial institution is different. And your clients and portfolio companies are diverse. For this reason, the Principles highlight approaches – such as developing transition plans – that are both rigorous and flexible.

They help set shared expectations for net-zero commitments while being adaptable to your and your clients’ progress along the transition.

All of this is in service of achieving shared goals: navigating both risks and economic opportunities as the United States builds the clean energy economy of the future. Today, I hope we can discuss the challenges and opportunities your firms are facing as we work to realize those goals.

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