Bloomberg reported General Electric is considering spinning off parts of its finance unit through an initial public offering.

According to Bloomberg, while speaking at the Electrical Products Group Conference in Longboat Floriday yesterday, Immelt said, "Putting things up for sale with the assumption that a bank would buy it has been a fool’s journey."  He continued saying, "So the only way you’ve been able to think about this is by thinking about IPOs.”

The move will help shrink GE Capital’s ending net investment, a measure of its balance sheet, which will fall by more than 25 percent to as little as $300 billion by the end of 2014, Immelt said, without specifying which units could be divested, according to the report.  A spokesman for GE also declined to comment on which businesses might be included.

According to the Bloomberg report, the businesses that GE may exit “are great assets, fantastic, but we think our commercial finance assets are very strong and very consistent with our competitive advantage,” Immelt said. “The capital markets are very receptive to IPOs and a lot of different technologies today, so you basically have as good a setting as you could possibly have.”