GM IPO may hand bankers lowest fees since 1999

Wall Street bankers may be pushed to charge the lowest fees in at least a decade to arrange the Treasury’s sale of General Motors (GM) in what could be the second-largest initial public offering in US history.

Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley are vying to lead the automaker’s share sale, which may raise as much as $12 billion, an estimate by Independent International Investment Research showed. The US government may seek underwriting fees of as low as 2 per cent, according to finance professors at Cornell University and Georgetown University. That’s less than any US IPO over $5 billion since 1999, Bloomberg data show.

The Treasury, which owns a 61 per cent stake in GM, will pressure the banks to accept fees that may be less than half the 5.5 per cent average for all IPOs in the past decade after spending $150 billion in taxpayer money on the same financial firms during the credit crisis, the professors said. The underwriters would make as much as $360 million in an initial offering of GM based on the average 3 per cent fee for past deals over $5 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“The last thing they need is the government putting hundreds of millions into the banks’ pockets,” said Roni Michaely, a finance professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. “Especially with the public scrutiny and anger over Wall Street.”

Michaely, who studies IPOs, said the banks may make fees of as low as 2 per cent from underwriting GM’s share sale.

GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 1, 2009, after posting $88 billion of losses since 2004, the last year the company reported an annual profit. GM emerged 39 days later as the government agreed to make a $50 billion investment.

Chief Executive Officer Ed Whitacre wants the Detroit-based automaker to sell shares this year as it seeks to trim the Treasury’s controlling interest and eventually free itself from government ownership, according to people familiar with the matter. The Treasury, which has about $40 billion tied up in GM’s equity, will probably have more say than the automaker in hiring a lead bank to underwrite the IPO, two people familiar with the matter said last month.

Treasury officials and GM met with senior executives from Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America and New York- based Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley in Washington last month about hiring a lead underwriter, one of the people said.

Bankers pitching for the deal will be pressed by the government to lower their fees after facing public criticism for getting taxpayer bailouts and large bonuses as the economic crisis the banks helped create left more than 10 per cent of US workers without jobs, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based Harris Private Bank, which manages $55 billion.