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NEW YORK (AP) -- A group of banks on Tuesday managed to sell $1 billion of loans for Allison Transmission that they were forced to hold when investors passed on them a month ago, According to Standard & Poor's Leveraged Commentary & Data unit. The debt backs General Motors Corp.'s sale of the auto-parts maker to two private-equity firms for about $6 billion. The selling banks are Citigroup Inc., Lehman Brothers Holdings and Merrill Lynch & Co. Even after cutting their losses, the banks aren't off the hook yet. The loans now off their books were just one part of a $3.5 billion loan package. The fact that the banks were only able to unload a portion of the Allison loans doesn't augur well for deals involving lesser credits. "I was surprised that $1 billion of the deal was all they can scrape together," said Justin Monteith at KDP Investment Advisors. "It's sort of sad, too, because it's a much better company and a much better leverage situation" than other companies with deals pending in the pipeline, and "everyone's known about this deal for a while."
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