General Motors has lost 13.8percentt of its value in two days after announcing it was limiting how many shares of its stock it would swap for shares in its Hughes Electronics subsidiary.
The 160-year-old lender's chief executive, Robert Sharpe, promised a "back-to-basics" strategy as the UK's eighth largest building society confirmed it would swap its £182.5m debt for capital to bolster its financial strength.
Early this month, CIT announced an exchange offer, in which it would swap its outstanding bonds for new debt with later maturities, as well as preferred stock.
When Liverpool college announced that it would swap its independent school status to become a state-funded academy, the Labour peer Andrew Adonis described it as "perhaps the single biggest breach in the Berlin Wall between the private and state sectors of education in recent decades".
Microsoft said it would swap 1.1 of its shares for each share of Great Plains, a pioneer in computer-based accounting that is based in Fargo, N.D.
Third, it would swap much of its existing debt for two exotic types of bond: a "perpetual", meaning that the principal would never be repaid, and a "GDP-linked" bond, with payments tied to the health of Greece's economy.
