The 2012 Olympics in London provide the U.K. government with an opportunity to stimulate the country's slowing economy, General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said today.

"The Olympics give an excuse, give a form, give a venue to take this investment that governments are going to need to make," Immelt told an audience of business leaders at London's British Museum. "You have the best government project in the world already framed."

Governments around the world will be trying to "invent their own structures of how they can put investment back in the economy" after the financial crisis has fed fears of a global recession, Immelt said. London is using the 2012 games to build athletic facilities and housing in the East End, historically a poorer area of the city.

The British government has said it will bring forward a number of projects to stimulate the economy, which contracted in the third quarter at the fastest pace since 1990. Earlier this month, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said the country faced recession.

Immelt, 52, said other countries, including the U.S. and France, must follow suit with large spending projects to help stimulate their economies.

"The intersection between government and business is real, it's profound and it's going to be with us not just for a year or two but for a long time," he said.

He said developed nations will have to recalibrate the nature of their economies, arguing that the U.K. and the U.S.'s reliance on the financial-services industry "may just have been wrong."

"From 1980 till 2007, financial-service earnings as a percentage of total corporate earnings globally went from 10 percent to 45 percent — too much," he said.

GE is an official partner of the International Olympic Committee and one of its subsidiaries, NBC Television, is the biggest single contributor to the IOC's broadcast budget. At this year's Beijing Games, NBC had more than $1 billion in advertising revenue. GE's divisions also supplied infrastructure to the 2008 Olympics.