Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezenski, and the Financial Times‘s Chrystia Freeland on MSNBC this morning:
SCARBOROUGH: Chrystia, let me tell you what I would love for you to have somebody write an article on. I’m serious. I would like to have a study of all of the CEOs who were fired over the past eight years for not growing their businesses at 28% a year…
BREZENSKI: And how much they made when they walked out the door…
SCARBOROUGH:. No. No. And I’ll give you a great example, General Electric. We always, Why isn’t it growing at 48%? Why isn’t it growing at 78%? You must be failing. And not just General Electric…
FREELAND: There was a lot of pressure on lots of companies to lever up their balance sheets. What you’re saying is the paranoid and prudent are suddenly looking great…
SCARBOROUGH: The prudent? But guess what? The prudent have been fired. Again, a list of all of those CEOs who didn’t grow at the rate of these companies that have now gone belly up. Because they are all out there. There are guys out there saying, “Yeah, I got fired, I got kicked around because I wasn’t growing my company as fast as Lehman Brothers or…
At which point Scarborough swiveled in his chair, placed his long-idle coffee mug into the GE microwave beside him, and pressed “reheat” as the camera pulled in tight, to an audible groan from Brezezinski?
Oh, that’s that sitcom.
It’s actually an interesting angle that Scarborough raises. Still. Shades of 30 Rock.
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.