earnings. He could have said that GE was a bank attached to a huge, slow-growth industrial company that had just suffered a major rupture. “He absolutely should have done that,” explained Jeffrey Sprague, a longtime Wall Street research analyst. “I hate to call 9/11 an opportunity. It was a terrible event, but it was a real event that had economic implications that impacted his business and did provide an opening to reset things, and he really chose not to do it. I think not doing it early in his career, then with each passing year it just became harder and harder to even think about doing
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