<story><title>GE is laying off 20% of its workforce devoted to onshore wind power</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/06/ge-layoff-20percent-of-onshore-wind-workforce-hundreds-of-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>What gets me is how Jack Welch was held up as an amazing businessman and model for corporate flexibility for years while his changes utterly destroyed GE&amp;#x27;s future for short-term gains.  I&amp;#x27;d argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically.  There&amp;#x27;s got to be a better mechanism to force companies and countries to focus on long-term rather than short-term improvements.</text></item><item><author>SevenNation</author><text>&amp;gt; Meanwhile, General Electric is in the process of splitting into three publicly traded companies, focused on health care, aerospace and energy.&lt;p&gt;For some context, GE is kind of riches-to-rags story. Check out this chart of the share price:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tradingview.com&amp;#x2F;chart&amp;#x2F;?symbol=NYSE%3AGE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tradingview.com&amp;#x2F;chart&amp;#x2F;?symbol=NYSE%3AGE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a company whose stock is trading at 1994 levels. It never recovered from the &amp;quot;dot-com&amp;quot; crash of 2001. The dividend yield is nowhere close to a US treasury at any maturity. It&amp;#x27;s losing money left and right. A good chunk of that was the pivot, under Jack Welch&amp;#x27;s leadership, from actually making stuff into financial services, shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way. GE was therefore well-placed for full-impact during the GFC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s got to be a better mechanism to force companies and countries to focus on long-term rather than short-term improvements.&lt;p&gt;Unions with a board seat. Employee ownership. Shares in the hands of pragmatic investors who value long term over extraction and dumping the carcass on the next fool. People like Welch and characters like Gordon Gecko aren’t heroes, they’re cautionary tales, the Frank Underwoods (House of Cards) of finance and corporate management.</text></comment>
<story><title>GE is laying off 20% of its workforce devoted to onshore wind power</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/06/ge-layoff-20percent-of-onshore-wind-workforce-hundreds-of-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>What gets me is how Jack Welch was held up as an amazing businessman and model for corporate flexibility for years while his changes utterly destroyed GE&amp;#x27;s future for short-term gains.  I&amp;#x27;d argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically.  There&amp;#x27;s got to be a better mechanism to force companies and countries to focus on long-term rather than short-term improvements.</text></item><item><author>SevenNation</author><text>&amp;gt; Meanwhile, General Electric is in the process of splitting into three publicly traded companies, focused on health care, aerospace and energy.&lt;p&gt;For some context, GE is kind of riches-to-rags story. Check out this chart of the share price:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tradingview.com&amp;#x2F;chart&amp;#x2F;?symbol=NYSE%3AGE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tradingview.com&amp;#x2F;chart&amp;#x2F;?symbol=NYSE%3AGE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a company whose stock is trading at 1994 levels. It never recovered from the &amp;quot;dot-com&amp;quot; crash of 2001. The dividend yield is nowhere close to a US treasury at any maturity. It&amp;#x27;s losing money left and right. A good chunk of that was the pivot, under Jack Welch&amp;#x27;s leadership, from actually making stuff into financial services, shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way. GE was therefore well-placed for full-impact during the GFC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;d argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious, what are the things that happened during the Clinton administration that you think were short-term gains at the expense of long-term improvements? I&amp;#x27;ve always felt that many of the &lt;i&gt;fiscal&lt;/i&gt; policies of Clinton &lt;i&gt;were&lt;/i&gt; in favor of long-term stability (e.g. specifically his tax policies and balancing the budget).&lt;p&gt;Now, with &lt;i&gt;monetary&lt;/i&gt; policy and Greenspan specifically, I 100% agree that the &amp;quot;Greenspan put&amp;quot; was absolutely a disaster for long-term stability, but Greenspan was in office from 1987 - 2006 (originally nominated by Reagan), so I see his choices as pretty orthogonal to whoever was president at the time.</text></comment>