General Electric Corp., as part of a turnaround plan announced November 13, halved its common stock dividend, from $.24 to $.12. per quarter, a fifty percent reduction. Wall Street had anticipated this move, but the stock has declined 8 percent following this announcement. Given GE’s lengthy connection with the locomotive industry, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to view the company as a slow moving train wreck, at least in terms of share price performance. Under former CEO Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s stock declined forty percent while the S&P 500 stock index more than doubled. Today’s dividend cut is simply one more in a long list of indignities for shareholders starting in the year 2000 when the stock peaked at about $60 per share. (It is trading a tad below $19 today.) But since August this Stamford-based conglomerate has had a new Chairman and CEO, John Flannery. The dividend cut and proposed […]