dihard:

is roughly the percent of GM that we each own.

$362 is what each of us paid for that equity stake.

That’s because $50,000,000,000 is the total amount the US Treasury has spent of GM’s survival. (That’s $30.1 billion for 60% of New GM’s equity + $20.6 billion that we spent trying to keep them out of bankruptcy.) And that’s just the beginning of it.

So $83,000,000,000 is what New GM would have to be worth in order for us to break even on our investment.

But $56,000,000,000 is what GM was worth at its all time peak in 2000.

And it’s only worth about $7,300,000,000 now.

So New GM would have to have about a 48% increase in value from its all time peak. Likely?

Even if we do the math differently, considering the $20.6B “sunk costs” and saying “we” paid $30.1B for 60% of GM, the prospects aren’t pretty. With 610.56M shares outstanding, “we” own somewhere in the neighborhood of 366.34M shares, for which “we” paid something like $82.16 each. GM shares have reached that value only once, in early 2000.

Not pretty at all.