It rounds off one of the worst seven days of Jeffrey Immelt’s career. Last Friday the chief executive of General Electric had to admit to Wall Street that profits at the world’s second biggest company had missed targets and had fallen 6 per cent. To make matters worse, the admission hit the entire New York stock market as traders interpreted the numbers as a sign that the US economy was in even worse trouble than first believed. The Dow Jones industrial average sank 256 points — a 2 per cent drop.

Mr Immelt might have thought that after a few tense conversations with analysts and shareholders, he could move on. He might have thought that until he switched on his television yesterday to see his formidable predecessor, Jack Welch, threaten to “get a gun out and shoot” Mr Immelt if he failed to achieve new targets.

So angry was Mr Welch, who retired in 2001, at his successor’s failure and the 13 per cent fall in GE stock, that he said: “I would be shocked beyond belief and I would get a gun out and shoot him if he does not make what he promised. Deliver the earnings. Tell them you are going to grow 12 per cent and deliver 12 per cent.”

As if viewers needed him to elaborate, Mr Welch added: “Here’s the screw up: You made a promise that you would deliver this and you missed three weeks later. Jeff has a credibility issue.” Should Mr Immelt have found his viewing uncomfortable, Mr Welch did add that he felt the business model (created largely by himself) worked and that he believed Mr Immelt would recover from the debacle and win back the trust of shareholders, who should not clamour for major changes.

“This was a bad miss. This is a credibility crash. He’s got to earn it back. He will earn it back. But to take GE apart, what’s wrong with the company, it’s falling apart, blow up the model, sell NBC, sell real off estate, let’s go out of business because we had 24 hours of a mess?”

Mr Welch should not worry whether his message was sufficiently direct — it was put out on CNBC, a cable station that is owned by GE.

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