How he could have missed the gathering storm is hard to imagine, given what he had already seen at WMC, in the pleadings of his commercial real estate executives, and in the blowout of GE’s CDSs. To say nothing of the warning that Bill Gross and the ratings agencies had issued to him five years earlier. Or what Jim Grant had been writing about GE for years. Part of the problem for Jeff was that GE’s ongoing financial performance, at least through 2007, blinded him to the massive explosive device sitting on GE’s balance sheet.
