Under-Reported Story, But I'm Sure You're Following It

So GM has plans for an IPO later this month. This is both good and bad, first the bad. We own a large percentage of GM stock, which under normal circumstances an IPO would be good for, but we acquired that stock at a very lofty valuation. What was our valuation of GM? Priceless, or at least high enough that the company was deemed so important we couldn't let it fail. . . until of course, we did let it fail. After it failed, we converted our bailout dollars to equity, said "no jets for you" and prayed for an IPO to recoup our investment. From GM's prospectus, the mid-point of their expected pricing range is $25billion, we invested $50billion, so we're going to lose some money. This isn't bad, because like the prudent investor our government is, we're only planning on selling about 1/3 of our stake at the IPO, we're diversifying our divestitures and hoping the stock rises in the future and we can sell our remaining stake then, at a profit. The problem is that from my perspective, I don't see the company's shares doing much in the near future for a couple reasons. First, GM automobiles are still trailing the Asian manufacturers in reliability. Also, from GM's prospectus, "our disclosure controls and procedures and our internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective." They go on to say this could "adversely affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan," They sound confident, don't they? Their lack of confidence leads to my lack of confidence we'll ever see anything near one-hundred cents on the dollar we invested in GM, but at least we tried.