Detroit Regional Chamber > Media Coverage > Chamber President and Chief Executive Officer on Flashpoint to Discuss What’s Ahead for 2023

Chamber President and Chief Executive Officer on Flashpoint to Discuss What’s Ahead for 2023

January 3, 2023

Detroit Regional Chamber President and Chief Executive Officer Sandy K. Baruah participated in a roundtable on WDIV’s Flashpoint to discuss what’s ahead for 2023.

Flashpoint, WDIV Local 4
Jan. 1, 2023
Devin Scillian

DETROIT – A very Happy New Year to you and yours.

We turn the corner into a new year, and it seems pretty human to pause just a moment to look back and ahead.

Here’s one perhaps overlooked benefit of modern digital life — most of us don’t write as many checks anymore, so there’s a lot less of writing down the wrong year and tearing up checks for a week.

But the new year always brings with it the hope for bigger blessings than that, and let’s face it, 2022 was a challenging year for many people. Inflation ran amok for much of the year, and everything from gasoline to groceries made everyday purchases sting like a bee.

2022 was pretty awful for a lot of people in the path of natural disasters like Hurricanes Fiona and Ian. And just days before Christmas, it was a historic and savage blizzard that hit snow-savvy Buffalo with icy ferocity.

COVID doesn’t seem to care that most Americans don’t want to deal with it anymore, and it keeps taking lives and subjecting people to long COVID miseries.

Miseries seem to plague the southern border for those on both sides of the immigration fight.

And, of course, 2022 was not a good year to be Ukrainian. Even though you have to marvel at the toughness and ingenuity that has kept the Russian invasion in a surprising stalemate.

But as I tend to be a glass-is-half-full kind of guy, I hope we’ll remember 2022 for some stunning accomplishments that will bear fruit for years to come. Everything from the James Webb telescope and its ability to take us to the very beginnings of our universe to the recent announcement on nuclear fusion, which, as we discussed on the program a few weeks ago, holds almost unimaginable promise, even if it’s down the road.

So what’s ahead? That’s our charge this morning. We’ll talk about it with a roundtable of fearless prognosticators.