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Wither GMAC?

The GMAC situation has gotten less attention than the issues facing larger banks like Bank of America or Citi or than the issues facing the automakers. But as a bank dedicated largely to servicing auto sales, GMAC has double-dip problems as you can see in Kevin Drum’s chart:

blog_stress_test_results_3-1

I don’t quite see what’s supposed to happen from here. In principle, banks can raise needed capital from the private sector. But it seems very unlikely that anyone would want to invest in GMAC, especially when there are plenty of other financial institutions looking to raise capital. That leaves the government, but share-conversion mechanism that was used at Citi and will likely be used at B of A won’t, I think, do the trick with GMAC since there’s not enough government-owned preferred shares to convert.

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