And the winner is.....

......JC Flowers - JP Morgan Chase - BankofAmerica! Yup, when the dust settled, that was the winning lineup....offering $25 billion for Sallie Mae. JC Flowers will take a slightly better than 50% share while JP Morgan and BofA will take about 25% apiece.

The one thing that will be interesting here, is what these private equity firms are going to do with Sallie Mae. These companies typically are looking for an exit point to monetize any gain on investment. These gains are usually created by selling off non-core parts of companies. Heaven knows Sallie Mae has a number of non-core business lines: their IRS collections company, their student loan guarantee line, their account servicing line, their financing function, their marketing arm. Whoops, that's pretty much all Sallie Mae does. The point is, it won't be hard to break the company up into functional parts and package them up into attractive investments.