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Filed under: General Motors (GM), Initial public offerings

General Motors is hoping to emerge from bankruptcy conduct an initial public offering sometime in 2010, according (subscription required) to The Wall Street Journal. The IPO could either raise additional capital for the company or allow the United States and Canadian governments to begin divesting their stakes in the company.

Washington has been mum on how and when it plans to begin recouping its "investment" in General Motors. Earlier this week on DailyFinance, Peter Cohan wrote that our investment in GM has mostly gone down the tubes: "On June 2, a day after it filed for bankruptcy, I estimated that the new General Motors would have to reach a value 20 percent above its all time high in order to repay the $50 billion government loan it received to keep it from having to liquidate. A month later, The Washington Post is out with a similar analysis, which agrees almost to the penny with my estimate. My conclusion then was that reaching this value is unlikely and that our money is mostly gone."

Continue reading The hot new IPO of 2010: General Motors

The hot new IPO of 2010: General Motors originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Scandals

Here's today's update from the irony department -- special thanks to Sam E. Antar for emailing it to me. From a FORM 12b-25 filed with the SEC on June 30th:

"The Company recently discovered that it inadvertently issued more shares of the Company common stock in connection with its 401(k) Plan than were registered on the Registration Statement on Form S-8 (File No. 333-123540) relating to the plan. The Company needs additional time to ascertain the facts relating to this issue and to analyze the effects, if any, on the plan."

This would be a funny little accounting screw-up at any company, but that it happened at Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) makes it especially hilarious: This is a company whose CEO has complained to anyone would listen of a massive conspiracy to counterfeit shares of his company's stock and then sell them into the market -- driving down the stock price and allowing short sellers to profit.

And now we find out that Overstock itself was issuing shares beyond what had been registered with the SEC!

Of course it's probably not material, and there's no reason to think that it's anything other than an error.

But it's pretty awesome that a company goes around accusing people of selling stock that doesn't exist -- when it's issuing stock that shouldn't.

Overstock issuing phantom stock? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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