GE's Continuing Troubles

Once again, GE's recent performance demonstrates why the conglomerate needs to be dissolved.

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal described GE as reporting a 31% drop in first-quarter earnings.

The nearby price chart for GE and the S&P500 Index over the past five years illustrates that GE continues to have been a bad investment. Thus continuing CEO Jeff Immelt's unbroken record of mis-leadership of the ailing firm.

Without going into details, suffice to say that Immelt is crowing that the company's financial unit seems to have finally turned a corner on managing its losses. Of course, these losses played a big part in driving the once-proud firm into the arms of a government bailout, due to liquidity pressures.

Had the firm been split into its very large, naturally independent and unrelated pieces, the rest of the firm, and its investors, probably wouldn't have suffered so badly from the one unit's mistakes and excesses.

Perhaps the 50% drop in GE's price over the past five years is an emerging signal that investors are finally beginning to just say 'no' to the notion of an outdated conglomerate structure that masks great performances by any one unit, and results in mediocre results for the whole mess over time.