It was time for Jeff to “reset” expectations about GE’s earnings and GE’s stock. He could have put an end to Jack’s practice of managing earnings, taking any write-downs that needed to be taken, and he could have begun to defuse the ticking time bombs tucked away in the recesses of GE’s balance sheet. He could have told Wall Street that it was no longer reasonable for GE to have the astronomical price-to-earnings multiple that it had under Jack, often approaching fifty times earnings. He could have said that GE was a bank attached to a huge, slow-growth industrial company that had just
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