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It’s a bad day for a CEO when he announces he’s retiring and the stock goes up. That was Jeff Immelt’s day on June 12, 2017. The news of his departure was in one sense no surprise—some investors and analysts had been urging his ouster for years;but it was also a shock. He’d been General Electric’s CEO for almost 16 years, and outsiders were unaware of any specific succession plans or that ­Immelt, at age 61, had any intention of stepping down. Suddenly they were told that in just seven weeks he’d be gone as CEO (he remained nonexecutive board...

PHILADELPHIA — A Southwest Airlines jet apparently blew an engine at about 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window and damaged the fuselage Tuesday, killing a passenger and injuring seven others, authorities said. The plane, a twin-engine Boeing 737 bound from New York to Dallas with 149 people aboard, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia just before noon as passengers breathing through oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling said their prayers and braced for impact. "I just remember holding my husband's hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed," said passenger Amanda Bourman, of...

If your hackles are not yet up concerning the outlook for highly indebted multinational companies such as GE in a possible looming crisis of 2018, they ought to be.  From September 2008 until recently, we operated in a new world without traditional controls, prepared to believe everything and happy to own almost anything.  Skeptics were mocked, as markets rocked. However, in recent months, benchmark interest rates in the United States – the largest market in the world – are trending upward after ten years at historic low levels.  As interest rates rise, most asset values will fall.  Declining asset values are especially worrying for complex...

GE had been one of the biggest dividend payers in the United States, behind giants like ExxonMobil (XOM), Apple (AAPL, Tech30) and Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30). By cutting the dividend in half, GE will save more than $4 billion per year. That makes it one of the largest dividend cuts in the history of the S&P 500 and the biggest since 2009, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. GE made an even bigger dividend cut in 2009, during the Great Recession. But dividend cuts are rare these days. Many companies are increasing them because the U.S. economy is healthy and the...

Major American foundations have given millions of dollars in funding to Islamic organizations accused of having ties to radical Islamist movements or designated terrorist organizations and a group of activists are trying to convince them to stop. Groups like Islamic Relief Worldwide, which some countries have banned for allegedly funding Hamas and other terrorist organizations, have received millions of dollars from corporate charities like the GE Foundation, community foundations like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and independent foundations like George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.Researchers with the Middle East Forum, an activist group devoted to promoting American interests abroad, identified the financial...

We saw yesterday how Microsoft’s absence in mobile led to the removal of Surface tablets from Delta’s employee offerings, and today we have more evidence of the erosion of Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise as companies increasingly work to simplify their platforms. Industrial giant GE has announced a partnership with Apple to bring Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet, to Apple’s iPhone smartphones and iPad tablets. The new Predix-iOS software development kit will include tools that software developers can use to write industrial apps that will run on Apple’s iOS operating system. The new partnership means that a...

The fix is in. Did you know, corporations like General Electric Co. (GE) spend more money on lobbyists than they pay in taxes? The federal government currently taxes corporations at 35 percent. While many argue the rate is too high, you don’t hear companies like GE complaining about it. That’s because they aren’t paying it. Over the past 15 years, GE’s federal income tax rate averaged only 5.2 percent. General Electric paid no federal taxes in 2010, despite earning $5.1 billion in U.S. profits. Instead, the company claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Meanwhile, GE executives awarded themselves more...

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The Export-Import Bank charter will expire in a few days, on June 30, unless Congress acts to reauthorize it. The Export-Import Bank was created more than 80 years ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help foreign customers buy goods from the United States. Some companies benefit from the Export-Import Bank and they are the first ones to defend its reauthorization. But let’s be clear: Companies benefit from Export-Import Bank loans at the expense of taxpayers and other businesses. Taxpayers—not the companies themselves—assume the risk of a foreign loan, made through a private bank (like Goldman Sachs), to purchase a...

<p>Jeffrey Immelt is stepping down as chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co., bringing to an end a tumultuous 16-year tenure in which he dramatically reshaped the manufacturing powerhouse but failed to win over Wall Street.</p> <p>Amid mounting pressure from activist investor Trian Fund Management, GE said Monday that Immelt will be replaced by John Flannery, a 30-year company veteran who oversaw a jump in profits at the health-care unit. In a sign of just how great opposition to Immelt had become in the investing community, the stock soared the most in more than a year and a half after the announcement was made.</p>

They say that "life imitates art"...or is it the other way around...the lines are getting so blurred. In any event, we thought we would take this opportunity to highlight some of the most startling discoveries we found so far in Doug Stamper's...sorry, John Podesta's emails. You have to admit there are some similarities there and they even have the same position...hopefully the Clinton Foundation is receiving royalties from HBO... Yesterday we pointed out the many amazing one-liners offered up by Hillary as she was out collecting millions of dollars for her "Wall Street speeches." Here is an expanded sample: Hillary...

GE’s challenges are multiple but consistent, Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Bornstein said, borne out of slow global economic growth and turbulent geopolitical times—everything from the U.K. vote to leave the European Union to Middle East turmoil and currency shifts. “All this uncertainty generally limits growth,” Mr. Bornstein said. The company forecasts revenue will improve over the remainder of the year, helped by an anticipated surge in power turbine shipments. “Bottom line, we are seeing organic growth accelerating in the second half,” Chief Executive Jeff Immelt said on a conference call Friday. While the company’s oil and gas and transportation businesses...

The CEOs of two of the largest U.S companies — Microsoft and GE — pushed back strongly against a political tide that threatens to weaken America's ties to the global economy. Monday on CNBC's " Squawk on the Street ," Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella took aim at U.S. trade policies that would prevent the country from remaining a "beacon of progress" on the world stage. "Right now what I'm looking for is the politics in our country to get to a place where people can win elections by making a case for both globalization and addressing the inequities that...

Annual pay raises don't work. The salary increase serves two purposes: to motivate workers and to keep employees from leaving for a better-paying job. In its current form, the traditional raise does neither of those things very well. "You can't really do a lot with the annual raise," said Evren Esen, director of survey programs at the Society for Human Resource Management. When the economy is decent, annual pay adjustments come in at 1 percentage point or 2 percentage points ahead of inflation for a given year. That doesn't go far. Employees expect to get at least the cost of...

SEOUL— General Electric Co. has clinched a deal to supply engines for South Korea’s next-generation fighter jets. The U.S. conglomerate beat Eurojet Turbo GmbH, a European engine maker, to provide the F414-GE-400 engines, South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said Thursday. A final contract will be signed next month, it said. The agency didn’t disclose the deal value, but a person familiar with the matter estimated it at $3.5 billion. The deal is part of one of South Korea’s most ambitious weapons-development programs. The project, Korean Fighter Experimental, or KF-X, is part of Seoul’s plans to replace its decades-old fleet...

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who has been praising anti-GOP establishment for more than a year, called Texas Sen. Ted Cruz a "sure bet" on his Twitter page over the weekend.

General Electric’s big move to Boston this summer could mean much more than leaving an empty corporate campus behind. Residents and small business owners in the tony town of Fairfield, Conn. – home to GE’s global headquarters for more than four decades – are bracing themselves for the collateral damage after the company announced last month it would be moving to Massachusetts and taking 800 jobs, millions in grants and opportunities for expansion with them. But that’s not even the half of it. The trickle-down devastation triggered by GE’s move is predicted to spare no sector. The real estate market...

"Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." It's an interesting idea to ponder. President Lincoln is praised universally today, across the aisle, and around the world, but what of Samuel Colt? Who is Samuel Colt? ...The region reminds me of New York's former boomtowns like Kingston and Binghamton, and Connecticut's Waterbury and Hartford. These once vibrant communities and buildings were gutted by the twin blades of time and politicians, their facades decaying and cadaverous, lining streets and throughways like architectural tombstones. Where is everyone? Kingston and Binghamton were home to IBM and Singer Link....

By the end of the year, GE will cease production and sales of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), the manufacturer announced this morning. Moving forward, the company's focus will fall entirely on halogen incandescents and on high-efficiency LEDs. "CFL's kind of been the light bulb that everybody loves to hate," explained John Strainic, chief operating officer of GE Lighting, citing the history of complaints about CFL dimmer compatibility, brightness delay, and quality of light. Strainic says that the industry has come a long way, but admits that the perception of inferior performance lingers. "Ultimately, LED offers a better solution at a...

My review: This book is fascinating on so many levels but one of the most interesting, and unexpected, is the government-science collusion in the study and manipulation of WEATHER and climate. Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt's brother was a scientist at GE. Kurt worked there in the public relations department (as did later Ronald Reagan). The author herself never claims this however, it is not hard to see the connection to this early government manipulation and hold over climate science and the origins of "climate change" came from government funded studies of weather by GE (General Electric) in the post war years....