GE CEO Jeff Immelt: America’s Competitive Edge Has “Slipped Away”

Hat tip to Michael Mandel, Business Week Magazine’s award-winning chief economist, who published the below excerpts from GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s Detroit speech on June 19. Check out Mandel’s economics blog here; it’s always worth a read.

What do you think? Do you agree with Immelt?

“Throughout my career, America has seen so much economic growth that it was easy to take it as a given. We prospered from the productivity of the information age. But, we started to forget the fundamentals and lost sight of the core competencies of a successful modern economy. Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy – and somehow still expect to prosper.

“That idea was flat wrong. And what did we get in the bargain? We’ve seen a great vanishing of wealth. Our competitive edge has slipped away, and this has hit the middle class hard.

“As a nation, we’ve been consuming more than we earn, saved too little and taken on far too much debt. Growth in research and development has slowed. Our country has made too little progress on some of the defining challenges of our time – like clean energy and affordable health care. Our budget and trade deficits have reached levels that are clearly not sustainable.

“While some of America’s competitors were throttling up on manufacturing and R&D, we deemphasized technology. Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services. While our financial services business has performed well, I can’t tell you that we were entirely free of these errors. We weren’t.”

That, and more excerpts, here.

Click here to read the complete speech at the Wall Street Journal website (must be a subscriber).

Craig DiLouie

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