Word: jett
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...America, is suddenly fighting for his honor as GE faces embarrassments from its outpost on Wall Street to its half- century-old engine division in Evendale, Ohio. Chief among the problems is the mess at Kidder Peabody, GE's money-losing brokerage unit, where head government-bond trader Joseph Jett concocted $350 million of phony profits over a 29-month period before he was fired in April. Jett now claims to have been acting with the knowledge of his superiors. The scandal led Welch to sack the Kidder chairman, Michael Carpenter, whom he had installed in 1989, and triggered fresh...
Welch also scoffs at the notion that his emphasis on winning might encourage employees to cheat or cut corners to meet corporate goals. "Joe Jett was thinking about GE's quarterly earnings sitting down there?" he asks rhetorically. "Anybody with an IQ over 70 would know that Joe Jett didn't , care about GE's earnings. He never thought about GE. He had a game going for himself." Besides, says Welch, he has no choice but to call upon his employees to push their limits. "How can you tell an organization, 'Run slower'?" he asks...
...reason that no African American was in a position to commit one. Back then, being a messenger or clerk was the best job a black could hope for on Wall Street. Beyond that, many whites thought blacks lacked the intellect to devise a scheme as sophisticated as the one Jett is accused of, much less implement...
...things have changed. If Kidder, Peabody's charges are to be believed, Wall Street and America have now progressed to the point that an African American is considered smart enough to run a bond-trading operation so arcane that many financiers, regardless of race, cannot fathom its complexities. And Jett was perceived as doing so well in the job that the firm's white leadership empowered him to trade for a two-year period with virtually no supervision. Leave aside whether Kidder, Peabody's charges against Jett are plausible. In a way his guilt or innocence is almost beside...
Most African Americans, to be sure, will not see the Jett case in so positive a light, for obvious reasons. There are already fears among the relative handful of blacks on Wall Street that the case will inspire a backlash that will make it harder for them to keep advancing in the financial world -- and it just might. On Wall Street and everywhere else in America, there is still a tendency for whites to hold all blacks responsible for the misdeeds of one, and blacks are still likely to feel defensive when some other black commits a crime. The death...