Francisco Franco is Still Dead. GMAC? No Se Nada.

GMAC. Bank or bust? We still don’t know. As we’ve reported at least twice previously, if the troubled lender failed to make the leap to hyper-suckle by Friday at 11:59 pm (i.e. get investors to swap out enough debt for equity to morph into a bank and scarf $6.3b or so from the Trouble Asset Relief Program, and a bunch more as federally secured debt), then the whole house of cards known as the domestic auto industry will come crashing down. Automotive News [sub] reports that GM spinmeister Gina Proia said the company expects to put out the results of the debt-for-equity swap in “the near term.” Let’s call that option C. Option A? GMAC did the deed but remained tight-lipped for the last two days because majority owners Cerberus never met a cloak of invisibility they didn’t wrap around their operation like Christo covering the Arc de Triomphe. After all, this is the same privately-held company that owns Chrysler, which expects Uncle Sugar to “lend” it $4b, despite the fact that we don’t know how Cerberus paid for it in the first place and/or who owns the paper on what now, after the sale and (presumably) deep borrowing against assets. And now, option B…

The GMAC debt-for-equity swap didn’t succeed, and the players have spent the weekend conspiring to end run the laws set-up by Congress to protect the sanctity of the American banking system on the voters’ behalf.

This seems the most likely scenario. Especially if you savor this little News McNugget: “The bank holding company approval was not contingent on the bond exchange,” Proia told Reuters. “But the debt swap was contingent on GMAC getting the bank holding company approval.” Huh? As far as I know, even though the Fed said, yup, sure, you can do that, GMAC still had to satisfy U.S. banking law. In other words, the Fed had pre-approved the transformation contingent on the swap.

We’ll keep you posted on the end, or the end run.