It seems that, as we venture further into the post-2008 crash financial world, the word “zombie” is popping up more and more, two sightings to be found in just a cursory scan of the news this morning, zombie buildings in Spain as reported by the Wall Street Journal and this commentary about zombie banks by Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg.

Zombie Banks Have Us Right Where They Want Us

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Here’s the kind of thing that passes for free enterprise now. Last month a fellow named Michael Carpenter, who is the chief executive officer of Ally Financial, got on a conference call with securities analysts and gushed with delight about the $3.5 billion price that General Motors had just agreed to pay for the subprime auto lender AmeriCredit. Based on that transaction, he proclaimed, Ally might be worth $30 billion.

GM, which owns a 6.7 percent stake in Ally, is Ally’s former parent.

“I love the AmeriCredit deal,” said Carpenter, whom some might remember from his days as the head of the securities firm Kidder Peabody. “I don’t have any doubt about our ability to repay the U.S. Treasury. So I think it’s great.”

The federal government so far has spent $17.2 billion to bail out Ally, the lender formerly known as GMAC Inc. Taxpayers hold a 56.3 percent stake in the company, which says it may hold an initial public offering next year if it can’t find a buyer.

What a spectacle. Here you had the CEO of a thrice-bailed- out zombie bank, drooling over how much a government-owned carmaker was going to pay for a publicly traded subprime lender, and using this price as a yardstick for his own bank’s paper worth. In a sane world, Ally would have been liquidated already. Any capital it’s able to raise is money that otherwise might go to more deserving enterprises.

Weil goes on to lament the propping up of the housing market, savers being punished with low interest rates, and  how we need to throw the bums in Washington out.