General Electric Co said on Tuesday most of its finance portfolio was performing as it had expected, and it does not anticipate having to raise additional capital to carry it through the current downturn.

GE Capital Chief Executive Mike Neal told investors the finance arm was running in line with its March model based on the Fed's base case for the U.S. economy, putting it on track to earn about $2 billion to $2.5 billion this year.

We're fairly close to where we thought we would be with the base case, Neal said in an investor meeting monitored over the Internet. We don't see any need to raise external capital.

The largest U.S. conglomerate has stopped giving per-share profit targets for the whole company, instead providing investors with a framework of how it expects its various divisions to perform.

The company said its 2010 stress test modeling predicts similar losses on its loans to what it has seen in 2009, and noted that so far this year losses were trending slightly better to what it had forecast using the Fed's base case.

GE Capital also aims to reduce its selling, general and administrative expenses 29 percent this year and cut its long-term debt to $230 billion to $250 billion by the end of 2012, down from $369 billion at the end of 2008.

GE last week said it had received approval to start pulling back from a U.S. government-backed debt program. It said it would stop issuing commercial paper through the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.

Its shares were little changed, off 3 cents at $12.28 in early New York Stock Exchange trading.

GE Capital's businesses range from making loans to mid-sized businesses to investing in real estate to financing the purchase of jet engines and other heavy equipment made by its industrial parent company.

GE in February cut its quarterly dividend 68 percent, and in March was stripped of its former top-notch AAA credit ratings from Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service.

This is GE's second big investor update on the finance business this year. In March it convened a day-long confab where it warned analysts that profit at the unit could be lower than it had forecast in December, but underlined the unit's strict lending standards.

(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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