White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday ripped Eastman Kodak over their handling of a loan from the federal government to produce pharmaceutical ingredients, saying they made one of "the dumbest decisions" in history.
"Based on what I'm seeing, what happened at Kodak was probably the dumbest decisions made by executives in corporate history," Navarro told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday.
Kodak received a $765 million loan that has been paused while the Securities and Exchange Commission conducts a review of into allegations of insider trading. Although the company announced the loan July 28, a great deal of trading on Kodak stock began the day before the announcement was made, leading the stock to jump in price from $2 a share to $60 per share.
The Wall Street Journal reports Kodak shared information about the deal with members of the media before the public announcement, leading some media outlets to publish that information before it was supposed to be released.
"You can't fix 'stupid,'" Navarro added. "You can't even anticipate that degree of stupidity."
He said, "We don't know why that happened or what they did. Let the investigation happen. Kodak's doing an internal one as well, but we're moving forward. We're not looking in the rearview mirror."
A Kodak representative declined to comment to CNBC.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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