General Electric sure is taking this whole recession seriously.

We've had news that it is experimenting with a new management structure in India. And now GE has finally come out and said it's looking to cut its interests in NBC Universal after years of insisting it wouldn't.

It's unclear exactly how an NBCU deal would go down, but it sounds like something is going to happen. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told reporters on Friday that there are ongoing discussions about an IPO or another partnership, according to Reuters. GE currently owns 80 percent of NBCU and Vivendi owns the remaining 20 percent.

A report released Tuesday by the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, directed by Harvard professor Hal Scott and composed of various CEOs and academics, continued to sound the alarm that the U.S. capital markets have lost their competitive edge.

Looking at initial public offerings offered by foreign companies outside their home markets, issuance activity remained low in the second quarter, with only 14 global issues raising $2.5 billion.  That was only six more than the number of such IPOs in the first quarter, which raised $200 million.

The committee projected full-year activity to be 44 IPOs valued at $5.4 billion, compared to the 92 global IPOs valued at $20.9 billion for all of 2008, and 335 worth $95.8 billion in 2007. This represents the biggest decline in global IPO activity since the burst of the "dot-com" bubble, when the aggregate value of global IPOs averaged just $10.4 billion annually from 2001 to 2003.

But there was some good news.