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CASTS MOVE TO INJECT $9.5 INTO CAPITAL ARM AS PRUDENT

General Electric (GE)accelerated its timetable for lowering its debt-to-capital ratio at its GE Finance operation, but denied speculation that it's planning to alter its dividend policy as worries sparked by management comments last week suggested. While company officials downplayed the speculation about a dividend cut, it stopped short of promising to leave the payout intact, helping send shares down 8% in a session where most financial companies recorded losses.

GE's financial chief, Keith Sherin, said in a conference call the company would pump $9.5 billion into its GE Finance operation this month - a move Sherin said would pare the debt-to-capital ratio to six times from the current seven times.

The decision represented a change in the timetable GE previously outlined to bring the leverage at the capital operation down - it previously suggested such a move would take place by the end of 2009 - though not an outright change in tactics themselves.

However, Sherin didn't offer any substantive relief to investors worried about the dividend payment - anxieties sparked last week when the company, announcing its quarterly dividend payment, suggested its would ''evaluate'' its dividend policy in the second half of the year. Investors read that as a sign that the conglomerate, which raised capital twice last year, planned to cut its payout, which has risen sharply during the company's recent fundamental missteps. In a counter-intuitive move, however, the stock actually bounced the day the company talked about changes to its dividend policy, a move that some traders regarded as a short-covering rally rather than a fundamental reaction.

GE shares lost another 8%, and trades less than a dollar a share above the lows recorded last week, when the stock fell to a 13-year low.