“Kidder,” he told me, “was a small symptom of a larger problem that Jack Welch and Gary Wendt created: using the GE credit rating to build a massive lending operation that was more short-term funded, including with commercial paper, than any bank would have done after the early 1980s, and certainly not after 1994. A Harvard classmate of mine ran a commercial real estate lending operation at GE and there seems to have been no limit to GE Capital’s appetite.”
