The US Treasury sold another $570.1 million shares of General Motors stock last month. This keeps it on target to completely divest itself of the remaining shares of General Motors stock that it still owns by March of next year.
According to documents filed by the US Treasury, they’ve recovered $36 billion of their original $49.5 billion bailout investment in the company. It’s been four years now since the government first invested in General Motors in order to help the company successfully exit bankruptcy.
The US Treasury launched the third phase of its plan to sell off its remaining General Motors stock investment on September 26th. In December of last year they owned a majority share of 60.8% of General Motors but have been selling it off bit by bit ever since. The plan at that time called for them to completely divest themselves of the stock within 12 to 15 months all depending on how the market performed.
There was no disclosure as to exactly how many share of General Motors stock were sold in this latest round of sales, but they did say that the US Treasury now owns just 7% of the company’s stock. This is a big decline from where they started, but only a small change from where they were at the end of Phase Two when they owned 101.3 million shares or 7.3%.
Despite the huge amount of stock and the impressive dollar totals that it’s being sold for, the US Treasury still has no expectation that they’ll make any profit once the dust settles from the auto industry bailout. They estimate that they’ll lose $15 billion in the end.
The total cost of the bailout was $85 billion and included not just General Motors but Chrysler as well and was never intended to make a profit. The goal was to simply to save jobs and save the automakers.
Nicole Wakelin fell in love with cars as a teenager when she got to go for a ride in a Ferrari. It was red and it was fast and that was all that mattered. Game over. She considers things a bit more carefully now, but still has a weakness for fast, beautiful cars. Nicole also writes for NerdApproved and GeekMom.
