Green energy a poor investment for German company
IBD: The CEO of Siemens AG, the German manufacturing giant, has been sent packing. Seems the board had it with his stewardship. Instead of making solid gains, he took the company down a green energy hole. Peter Loescher was picked from Merck & Co. in May 2007 to lead Siemens out of a troubling time. What they got was an executive who made a bet on a trendy interest and didn't get the results that were expected of him. "This weekend," Bloomberg News reported Monday, the company "lost patience after Loescher's expansion into green energy and expensive acquisitions led to a fifth profit-forecast cut." Loescher was then dismissed on Wednesday. He can't say he wasn't warned. He needed only to look at Spain, where attempts to create a green economy failed miserably. Researcher Gabriel Calzada Alvarez at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos looked at the Spanish effort and found that for every green job that was created, 2.2 jobs were destroyed. Alvarez al...