GE, the Canary in the Economic Gold Mine
An Eye Opener
Last night I was reading a Bloomberg article “How GE went from American Icon to Astonishing Mess” by Drake Bennett and something hit me square in the face. I am generally focused on Macro charts and do not pay a lot of attention to charts on individual stocks.
The Visual
But while reading this article, I brought up a chart on GE for the period since 1990. And what jumped out to me, is how this chart reflects how I feel about how the economy and how it has felt to me for the past 30 some years. Looking deeper I think the same feeling was felt by the people who bought the Trump story, even though they picked a bad solution.
Details
So what we see in Macro terms is the big run-up into 2001, the Greenspan “Irrational Exuberance” period, then the “Irag and add a house bounce”, next the “Great Recession”, next the “Bernanke QE” bounce, and now the move down, probably to new all time lows, as we see the “America Base” build.
Perspective
When you think about it, and after reading this excellent article, you see that GE is this big conglomerate, that reflects grass roots America. It ran into a lot of headwinds in spite of all the blather from Jack Welch on CNBC. While all this was going on in the real America, one has to dig into the data to see why the S&P chart looks so much different. Is it because the “Fang” type stocks have created a new hall of mirrors reality which eventually will have to be reckoned.
It goes along with my Macro view that the real bottom off the 2001 S&P highs will be found when we clean out the false trading bottom made in 2009.
GE Stock Price
Major Move DOWN 1/26/18 7/ 27/17 high to 3/9/09 low
Range down Projection
High1/26/18 2872.87 2400.77 0.218% 1st Objective down
Low 3/6/09 666.80 2030.15 0.382%
Range 2206.07 1769.84 0.50%