10 - three very expensive ventures into computers, jet engines, and nuclear energy. Today, we are not bearing such losses and our surplus cash is approaching a billion dollars. Like most other companies, we were hit hard by the cash crunch of 1974 and our debt-to-total-capital ratio rose sharply in that year. We asked our managers to concentrate on balance-sheet management, and through heroic effort they not only brought us back to 26%, but generated all that additional cash. In fact, if we had used our cash build-up to pay off debt, rather than maintain our current favorable credit arrangements to support future growth, our ratio of debt to total capital would be somewhere in the middle teens. With the addition of Utah International, also a big cash producer these days, General Electric will be well positioned to finance its strategy for future growth in earnings. SOPHISTICATED MANAGEMENT Finally, this new General Electric Company has more sophisticated and adaptive management than it had a decade ago. And that is no aspersion on my colleagues of that earlier time, many of whom are with us still. We have all learned by experience and we are, you might say, the survivors of many successful and unsuccessful ventures over the years. But there is more to this than "The College of Hard Knocks". General Electric has developed and fine-tuned a new management system in the past decade, and the initiative for this came from my predecessor,