Hmmm, let's see...there was a big tongue-kiss article on Immelt from Reuters a few days ago:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-ge-immelt-idUSTRE74I4UL20110519Immelt, who was tapped by U.S. President Barack Obama in January to head an advisory panel on job creation, is also expanding the company's presence overseas. With the U.S. economy still in a sluggish recovery from the recession, he sees the fast-growing emerging markets of China and India, as well as oil-rich countries in the Middle East, as offering GE's best growth prospects for the next few years.
In 2010 GE generated about 53 percent of its revenue outside the United States, up from about 33 percent in 2000. Immelt himself travels so much that he only wears watches with built-in alarm clocks. With an eye toward growing foreign sales, he shifted Vice Chairman John Rice to Hong Kong this year, a move intended to help GE's Asian operations make decisions faster.
"If we woke up tomorrow and we're in a trade war with China where nothing can happen and no trade can occur, or if you woke up and saw what's going on in Libya was all of a sudden happening in Saudi Arabia, those are big secular threats that in the end I think have as much to do with GE's success as anything else," he said.
Seems to me that having a strong manufacturing base, competition and customers in the U.S. would be a good way to protect against that, but what do I know? In any case, let's see what the council itself is up to:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/business/2-u-s-jobs-council-members-talk-to-area-business-leaders-1157470.htmlVANDALIA (Ohio) — Two members of President Barack Obama’s new council on job development visited the region Tuesday and praised the Dayton area for its manufacturing legacy and role in aviation history.
“I know for a fact that Dayton works,” said Jeff Immelt, head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and chief executive and chairman of industrial giant General Electric Corp. Immelt noted that GE has more than 1,000 employees in the Dayton area, and GE Aviation will occupy a research and development center off River Park Drive.
Karen Mills, administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, said, “Small business is really the engine of growth in a community like this.”
Immelt and Mills were among the council members who met with local business leaders and owners as part of the board’s inaugural information-gathering session.
Wait, "inaugural information-gathering session"? Just last week? Way to jump right on that jobs thing there.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/23/BU7C1JJLM5.DTL#ixzz1NNkmhnDhSeven publicly traded U.S. corporations represented on President Obama's advisory Council on Jobs and Competitiveness - including Intel Corp. - have devoted a growing pool of their non-U.S. earnings to investments in other countries.
As a group, multinational companies with current or former chief executive officers on Obama's jobs council have, over the past four years, almost doubled the cumulative amounts they've reinvested overseas, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Well, that's certainly telling. It doesn't look like change to me, but it sure looks like something.