I'm here to tell you about GE. First of all, there is no such thing as publicly-traded GE preferred stock - Berkshire Hathaway owns the only such stock currently issued, at 10% yield, and GE had to give Buffett a bunch of warrants (stock price upside) in order to get him to buy it.
The other GE tickers that you're talking (GEA, GEP, GER, etc.) about are for baby bonds, which are senior unsecured debt in GE Capital Corporation. Fortunately for you, that's better than preferred stock, although I would recommend more caution about buying assets that you can't accurately categorize. They have a par value of $25, which means that they're just like a regular bond except 1/50 of the size (and therefore easier for individual investors to buy). For a small investor, they are almost certainly a better idea than buying full-size GE Capital bonds, because your transaction costs will be much lower and you have more choice about the size of your investment. They also are ahead of the common and preferred stock in the event of a default, but they're part of a huge pool of senior unsecured debt that I believe all stands on an equal level in terms of repayment - that is, not paying the interest would be equivalent to default on a regular GE Capital bond, which would be a Big Deal.
It's hard to find much precise information about the corporate structure of GE, but given some the cheapo asset sales away from Lehman Bros Holding Co and the WB-Citi deal that almost happened, I'd be a little scared that in the event of further financial market degeneration GE might somehow cut GE Capital loose of the industrial company. It says in the annual report that GE's industrial wing will provide capital to GE Capital if necessary, but it doesn't give a lot of detail about how much/when/what if they don't? If GE's industrial operations really back up their financial operations 100%, why are there two separate corporations and why is almost all the debt labelled as GE Capital debt?
Given all the opportunities in stocks that could double over the next few years if the economy doesn't totally collapse, all the fears about defaults by major companies, and the lingering possibility that our government will find a way to inflate out of asset price declines, why would you take on financial debt yielding 7%? I know that GE feels safe to a lot of people, but doesn't the massive fall in companies as well-respected as LEH and AIG make you a little worried about a company carrying $500 billion in debt to support an asset pool of all sorts of loans you don't know much about?
