GE A Good Bet

From Barrons

GENERAL ELECTRIC, AT 30.76, closed Friday with a dividend yield of 4.03%. The 10-year Treasury yield was 4.05%. General Electric (ticker: GE) is rated triple-A, rightly. The U.S. government implicitly is rated triple-A, and retains this halo strictly for its taxing authority. GE's yield will grow; your bonds' won't.
Until the past few months, GE's yield has been equal to or below the Treasury yield only once, in early 2003, right before GE's shares and the stock market took off. Maybe this isn't enough to make GE a ripping Buy (identifiable catalysts are few), but it suggests the downside is limited and the shares finally are out of favor enough, after the company's clanging earnings miss last quarter, to improve their risk/reward equation.
At below 14 times expected earnings, GE -- composed of roughly 45% infrastructure/industrial profits, 35% financial, 11% media and 9% health care -- trades in line with a like blend of industry-comparable multiples, based on a back-of-the-envelope reckoning. In other words, an investor at long last need not assume that GE's businesses are above-average -- as, in most cases, they certainly are -- to justify buying the stock.
CEO Jeffrey Immelt admirably turned the other cheek to his predecessor's recent public chiding, when he could have pointed out that former CEO Jack Welch's reputation and personal wealth were swollen beyond calculation by the stock market's general valuation inflation during his tenure. More important, Immelt continues to buy GE shares in the open market, $3.5 million just last week.