DealZone

It looks like the long-awaited return to market for GM is only weeks away. The listing could raise up to $20 billion, we’re told by a person with knowledge of the preparations. That would be quite a bit more than the $15 billion that has been talked about. But wait, there’s more!

What does a car company with a solid financing business do to keep the wheels moving? Sources tell us that GM is also in talks with JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo on deals aimed at providing improved access to consumers for auto loans at its U.S. dealerships.

GM Chief Executive Ed Whitacre and other executives have said they favor an IPO as early as this year. Bankers had expected a stock listing to raise between $10 billion to $20 billion by selling part of the U.S. government’s 60.8 percent stake in GM to investors.

With Congress already debating a sweeping overhaul of financial regulation, perhaps the most enduring regulatory stricture of the Depression era is again getting an airing in Washington. The venerable Glass-Steagall laws that barred large banks from affiliating with securities firms and engaging in the insurance business were repealed in 1999. Now, as the banks try to move on from the dreaded salary caps and the humiliation of TARP, lawmakers are wondering whether getting rid of Glass-Steagall was such a good idea.

Financial giants such as Goldman Sachs could be broken up under two bills introduced in Congress on Wednesday, one with the backing of former Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Both would reinstate Glass-Steagall. Passage of the Cantwell-McCain bill would force firms at the center of last year’s financial crisis — such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — to spin off investment and insurance operations, according to Demos, a progressive think tank in New York. A similar measure was offered on Wednesday by six Democrats in the House of Representatives.

To be fair, many have wondered whether dumping Glass-Steagall was such a good idea. What’s odd is that the discussion about bringing it back comes as almost an afterthought to the massive regulatory reform bill now before Congress. Rather than start from scratch, it may have made more sense to try to reinstate laws that the marketplace was already familiar with, and add new bits around the edges.

As several large banks rush to the market to raise capital, one question remains: What’s the correlation between their ability to raise equity now and their strength in the face of a deeper recession if the early signs of a possible recovery prove false?

This morning Morgan Stanley joined the bandwagon of banks raising capital to pay back TARP. The Wall Street bank said it intends to raise $2.2 billion in common equity to satisfy a supervisory condition to enable it to redeem TARP preferred capital. It follows JPMorgan Chase and American Express, which announced their plans Monday.

The offerings come after the Fed said Monday the government will announce next week which of the 19 stress tested banks will be allowed to repay the funds. One condition for repayment is that they are able to raise money in the public equity markets.