GE heads for junk heap

The conglomerate is making little progress reducing a debt mountain that could destabilise the wider corporate bond market. Marina Gerner reports.

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GE's power business is in trouble

General Electric (GE) was once America's most valuable company. Today, says Patti Domm on CNBC, it is "fighting to stay off the junk heap". The company has about $115bn in debt and it recently lost its coveted single-A credit rating. Its bonds are already trading as if they were junk-rated the yield on its five-year bond has jumped to 6.2%. Meanwhile GE posted a loss of $22.8bn in the third quarter, among the largest in US corporate history.

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.