U.S. Government Will Sell It’s GM Shares This Year – Another Wistful Dream Is Dashed

The chatter in Washington is that the U.S. Treasury Department is going to sell most of its shares it received in General Motors stock in 2009 as part of the auto industry bailout package, perhaps as early as this summer. The reasons are either political or financial, depending on whom you ask. Some will tell you that the Obama administration wants the sale this year so that the federal bailout of GM is a non-issue in the 2012 presidential election, and some say that the sale is going to happen this year because the Treasury department thinks the current stock price is as high as it’s going to get for the foreseeable future. 

Either way, unless the share price climbs above an unlikely $53 a share before the sale date, the Treasury’s dream of making a profit on the bailout is not going to be realized. At $53 a share, the federal government breaks even on the $50 billion it “loaned” GM, but at the current share price of approximately $30 (well below the $33 IPO price of last November, which raised around $20 billion), taxpayers would lose around $11 billion. 

The U.S. Treasury currently owns 500 million shares of the reconstituted GM, which represents 33% of the company’s worth. 

Departing Waterfall – Next Stop Agile

It’s been more than a year since I penned, “Before Making the Leap to Agile“, an article intended to guide everyone from C-level executives to IT project managers on the adoption of Agile. The goal was to offer up some of the lessons I learned through actual implementations, so that readers could avoid of some of the pitfalls associated with Agile adoption.  While a few saw it as an assault on Agile, many understood that my goal was to assist Agile adopters and thanked me for writing it.

Five-thousand-plus page views later on the last article, and I’ve finally cleared my plate enough to address an equally important topic, why people, and organizations, are making the shift to Agile from the more typical Waterfall. After all, Agile is a revolutionary approach to software development and it continues to grow in popularity, so I think it’s important for those who do not yet use Agile to understand why others have embraced it.

R.I.M’s Live or Die Moment

It seems ridiculous almost to the point of being sublime to suggest that Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, is in need of a turnaround. Yet, if you listen to the pundits of the technology industry, it seems as if Research in Motion (R.I.M), the Canadian technology powerhouse, is on its last legs and will soon be plowed under by the onslaught of Apple and Android technology. And, even though the company shipped a record 52.3 million phones in the last fiscal year, a sharp 43 percent spike over the previous year, and, its fourth-quarter income of $924 million exceeded forecasts, people are saying that the company is going to be the unwitting star of an industry movie called “Palm: The Sequel” as a result of its aged technology platform and paucity of applications for that old operating system.