Obama picks loser CEO to head economic council

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.

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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.