The U.S. Treasury Department seems to be accelerating its plan to jettison its ownership of General Motors, unloading $489.9 million in shares in February 2013. To compare, that’s over three times of the $156.4 million The Treasury sold in January 2013, which marked the first month the department sold shares to the open market.
The exact amount of how much Uncle Sam sold off was not revealed, but GM’s stock was trading in the vicinity of $26-$28 per share last month, which comes out to be somewhere in the ball park of 18 million shares. This also means that The Treasury has so far recovered $29.8 billion of its $49.5-billion it spent to salvage GM in 2009.
Estimations also put the outstanding amount of shares The Treasury owns at around 270 million. So to break even, the government would have to find GM shares trading at around $72.
Comment
Not surprising that the shares sold in Feb were 3 times that of Jan. Jan had all of 8 days where the markets were open