Obama picks loser CEO to head economic council

President Obama has picked General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt

Obama picks loser CEO to head economic council

By Steve Milloy
Friday, January 21, 2011

President Obama has picked General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to head a new White House economic group called the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Here’s what Immelt has accomplished since taking the helm of GE in September 2001:

•GE’s stock price was about $40 per share when Immelt took the reins at GE. Today it is about $18/share. The stock price went below $7/share in March 2009.

•GE needed a $139 billion taxpayer bailout during the financial crisis (the FDIC backed GE Capital debt).

•GE gave 18,000 employees the ax during 2008-2009.

•GE’s dividend is 63.5% lower than it was two years ago.

Any way you measure GE’s performance under Immelt, he’s been a disaster. What will he do for our economy? We shudder to think.

GE was one of the founding members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership — a coalition of rent-seeking big businesses and radical environmental groups lobbying for cap-and-trade. I suppose we should be glad Immelt participated in that — it failed, too.

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