EconomicsUSA: Stock Market: General Motors Corporation and its spin-off liquidation corp

I decided to do a little sleuthing regarding the stocks traded on various stockmarket, the ones bawt and sold on the New York Stock Exchange, and indexed not on the Dow Industrial Average as it turns out, rather on the NASDAQ index. NASDAQ is the

U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on the trading of domestic securities not listed on the regular stock exchanges. It publishes two composite price indexes daily as well as bank, insurance, transportation, utilities, and industrial indexes. By the 1990s it had surpassed the American Stock Exchange (AMEX) to become the second largest U.S. securities market, in terms of market capitalization, after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Members register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and meet requirements for assets, capital, public shares, and shareholders. In 1999 it merged with AMEX to form the Nasdaq-Amex Market Group, and in 2000 NASD sold nearly half its interest in NASDAQ to private investors.

My motive was in rummaging about for relevamt factoids has been simply that I ran across a lovely little app, a freebie called StockMeter that puts a stock quotation or two in your main Menu Bar on your personal computer screen, and Stockmeter then follows the change in the quotation, as the stock is exchanged over the course of the day. What a hoot! An update every half-hour or so, of a specific stock I choose to follow for a while.  Read more ...





As my first stock I chose Apple; it has a quotation symbol to serve as a quotation semiote (AAPL) snd the figures in the quotation swerved and slid noticeably today -- from about 257 points to 252. If you tap on the red AAPL sign on the Menu bar at the top of your screen, you get a little drop down chart of the jagged course of Apple stocks as they pursue the ups and downs of buying and selling of Apple shares during the day, to the end result of the 5 point slide.

So I decided to add another--let's see, having tasted the career of a h+ tech industry stock, how about another American staple, an auto industry stock in the manufacturing sector (industry/sector distinction is important for a reformational economics), an industry which has seen a lot of turmoil during the Financial Crisis and its aftermath. Hmmmm. This time, I chose General Motors. I did my sleuthing and exploring and learned something to boot:

Ticker Symbol For General Motors
Update
General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy and the new GM is no longer publicly traded. It is privately owned by various interests such as the US Government, the Canadian government, bond holders, and the Auto Workers Union. The old General Motors (GM then changed to GMGMQ) has been renamed and given a new ticker symbol. It is now known as Motors Liquidation Company MTLQQ. These shares represent most of the bad assets of General Motors, and GM has said that even with the most optimistic of results little to no value will be associated with these shares.

MTLQQ continues to trade due to the fact that 'Short Sellers' had sold this stock without owning it. So at some point they must buy it back to replace the borrowed shares they did not own. Others are laying in wait for these buys to happen; and until they do, the stock will have some value. MTLQQ is a liquidation company so there could be some value left after the sale of assets but GM has publicly stated they expect little to no value to come from this process as a shareholder of the liquidation company itself.

How many Christians own stocks in this company? How many reformationals?, I wonder. Remember, one of the current owners is the United Auto Workers. The company and the union are closely tucked into an antipluralist framework for worker representation that prevents those workers who woud prefer to be represented by the Christian Labor Association USA (founded in 1931, but still locked out most everywhere, still small, but growing minutely every ploddiong step) -- aa I was saying, CLA-USA has no chance of gaining status as minority representative alongside the GM UAW local union in the factories of this corporation in turmoil and restucturing according to the "Obama Paradigm for the Union Advantage." He plays favourites, prioritizing until recently the Service Employees International Union, of which I was a shop steward in earlier days.

But of course many Christians, even some reformationals, will tolerate a company that runs a closed shop and which has brawt the union into ownership at the Obama govt's insistence. And has been rewarded with an ownership role. So, we see the sad spectacle of some investors in our broadly evangelical community and in our closer reformational community of thawt and witness in all of life, buying GM stocks to add to their portfolios.

Full disclosure: I own no stocks, but woud like to own one share of Apple (AAPL), and woudn't you know it, it's almost impossible to buy one share of any publically-traded corporation's stock. Haha, ahah!

-- EconoMix