Corporate CEOs Won’t Invest in America, Why Should You?

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession  (McGraw-Hill, 2009). There is no end of economists, analysts, and reporters filling the air with investment recommendations. Is the stock market oversold? Should we invest for inflation or deflation? And

General Electric is cut to AA+ by S&P

Read it at Alphaville: Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services today lowered its long-term ratings on General Electric Co. (GE) and units, including General Electric Capital Corp. (GECC), by one notch to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’. We affirmed the ‘A-1+’ short-term credit ratings. The outlook is stable. The main factor in the downgrade was our assessment of the

General Electric to cut dividend by over 67%

Now GE has finally cut, but will they be able to maintain their AAA rating

GE Capital’s looming time bomb

I do not think General Electric is AAA company — far from it. Their finance arm GE Capital is at the center of the private equity and asset-backed security time bombs that have yet to explode. And this makes the cash flow expected from GE Capital vulnerable because they are under-reserving. Translation: their financial results are artificially goosed by not reserving for likely losses.

In previous posts I have argued that GE must cut its dividend and that it will lose its AAA credit rating, despite an investment by Warren Buffett. The following video which focuses on the under-reserving at General Electric demonstrates why

Why is General Electric paying a dividend of 10%?

General Electric released its earnings report, posting net income in line with analyst estimates. And the world had a big sigh of relief. In posting its earnings, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt defended his company’s dividend and AAA rating

Pensions: $400 billion hole to reduce U.S. corporate earnings

An issue that has received scant acknowledgment in the media is the likely hole in pension funds books resulting from the recent out in shares. Pension funds must invest the money they receive today in order to provide pensioners funds tomorrow. The problem is that pension funds have been overestimating the likely returns for years and now that we have hit a rough patch in the economy this poor actuarial accounting is about to catch up with them

GE Capital is a bank, but Genworth will be too

A reader has recently corrected a claim I made on a recent blog entry regarding GE Capital. I would like to bring this error to your attention and make a few comments. The first statement is actually not correct. Looking at the FDIC Institution Directory yields two results

Should GE be a AAA company?

The latest news in bailouts involves GE Capital. Apparently, the company has gone begging to the FDIC for a bailout. In fact, the FDIC has offered to back $139 billion in GE Capital debt. I have serious reservations about this move by Sheila Bair. In fact, I am outraged.

First, as I understand it, the FDIC has much less than $139 billion in capital on hand. And they have hundreds of banks to watch that are busy going broke. So, how is it possible that they can guarantee GE Capital’s debt? The answer is they cannot. American taxpayers are what is behind this move just as they were with Fannie and Freddie – not that we will get stuck with the bill as GE is not going under, but the FDIC certainly can’t pay

Buffett to invest in General Electric

Warren Buffett is all over the place these days. He was busy investing at Constellation Energy and Goldman Sachs. Now, he’s investing at GE — $3 billion at that. Judging by his market timing approach, it does seem assets are cheap enough that he’s willing to step in and take a risk.But one must note,