无论谁啃完通用汽车(General Motors) 37万字的登记文件——大约有《战争与和平》(War and Peace)一书的五分之四那么长，都还是不会更明白通用汽车此次发行的规模有多大，或每位股东会出售多少股票。但证券监管部门可不喜欢历史小说，因此，无畏的读者能搜集到一份非常有用的对通用汽车的据实简短描述。
通用显然有足够的生存能力，更重要的是，规模足够庞大——在标准普尔500指数成分股公司中，规模大概排在第35位——因此，即便在11月份的预期发售日前全球经济降温，各基金管理公司也会认购其股票。一个可能会影响认购价的非经济考虑因素是“积压待发的股票”，即潜在的股票供应。此外的问题是，在已发行的5亿股股票中，有多少期会在接下来的发行中出售，以及需要多大的政治压力才能让纳税人全力加速这一进程。
甚至在周三宣布有稀释效应的强制性可转换优先股发行之前，潜在买家就已经知道，现有的认股权证可能会使通用的股票总量增加近22%。如果像预期的那样，通用的市值超过640亿美元，一家工会医疗信托可能会在已持有的8750万股基础上，再获得1520万股。鉴于这家工会曾迅速抛售了福特(Ford)的认股权证，并渴望实现多元化，它很有可能出售所持股票。债券持有人应获得的认股权证涵盖的股票数量要多得多，而且几乎肯定会是可执行的，因此在已经应获得的5000万股基础上，还会再增加近9400万股。
从理论上讲，这一切应该都没有关系。但在实际操作中，如果一支股票上市后，即便是由于暂时性的消化不良而暂时跌破发行价，基金经理仍会觉得自己很蠢。牵头经理会尽量做低通用股票的价格，以减轻这种担心，但股价仍要足够高，让美加两国政府可以宣称，纳税人的钱得到了偿还。通用汽车的文件不只是长度，就连次要情节和人物都足以和《战争与和平》相媲美。
Anyone who ploughed through all 370,000 words of General Motors’ registration document, some four-fifths as long as War and Peace, is none the wiser about how big GM’s offering will be or how much each shareholder will sell. But securities regulators frown on historical fiction, so a quite useful snapshot of the carmaker, warts and all, can be gleaned by the intrepid reader.
GM clearly is viable enough and, more to the point, big enough – set to be around the 35th largest company in the S&P 500 – that fund managers will subscribe even if the global economy cools before the expected offering date in November. One non-economic consideration that may influence the price they pay is “overhang” or latent share supply. This goes beyond the question of how many tranches of the outstanding 500m shares will be sold in subsequent offerings and how much political pressure to make taxpayers whole might hasten this.
Even before Wednesday’s announcement of a dilutive mandatory convertible preferred share offering, potential buyers knew that existing warrants could boost GM’s share count by nearly 22 per cent. A union healthcare trust may reap another 15.2m shares on top of the 87.5m it already owns if GM’s market value is above $64bn, as expected. Given the union’s rapid dumping of Fordwarrants and desire to diversify, it is a likely seller. Warrants for a far larger block of shares due to bondholders will also almost certainly be in the money, piling nearly 94m shares on top of the 50m they already are due to receive.
In theory, all of this should not matter. In practice, fund managers feel foolish when a stock temporarily dips below the offering price in the aftermarket, even if it is a result of temporary indigestion. Lead managers will have to price GM cheaply enough to assuage such fears but dearly enough for Washington and Ottawa to claim that taxpayers were repaid. GM’s filing contains enough subplots and characters, not just pages, to rival a Russian novel.
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