The U.S. Treasury Department will wait for General Motors Co’s first-quarter earnings before deciding whether to sell more of its investment in the nation’s largest automaker, a person familiar with the matter said.

The Treasury can sell some of its remaining 500 million GM shares, which equals 33 percent ownership, starting May 22, Bloomberg reported. Officials are waiting for GM’s earnings and to see what happens to the stock when bondholders in GM’s bankrupt predecessor company receive shares as partial compensation for their losses, said the person, who didn’t want to be identified because the plans aren’t public.

GM has dropped 20 percent this year in New York trading and 10 percent from its initial public offering price. While the Treasury may be willing to take a loss on the shares, which closed today at $29.59, the Obama administration is looking to sell at least in the range of the $33 IPO price, the person said. The government would need to sell the shares at about $53 apiece to break even on the investment.

“They will tell us when they’re getting out; I will not tell them when they’re getting out,” Dan Akerson, GM’s chief executive officer, told reporters today at an industry forum in New York. “There are many variables in their consideration and they don’t share that with us. They’ll notify us when they want to position for the sale.”

Mark Paustenbach, a Treasury spokesman, declined to comment. GM hasn’t said when it will report first-quarter earnings.

GM fell 38 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $29.59 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares slid as much as 2.7 percent earlier to the lowest price since the IPO in November.

The Treasury may file to sell shares with a traditional S-1 filing after a lockup period expires on May 22. The Securities and Exchange Commission would then review the offering like an IPO, which would delay the actual sale until June, the person said.

If the department waits until July 1, the government would be able to sell the shares with a less-thorough review and could get the offering started more quickly. In that case, the Treasury likely would wait until Detroit-based GM reports second-quarter earnings before selling more stock, delaying the sale until August, the person said.

The Treasury may make a third offering of shares in November or December and doesn’t need to sell all of the shares this year, the person said.

The department’s auto task-force members haven’t met with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who would decide on any GM share sale, to discuss the timing of a possible secondary offering, the person said.

The Treasury, which owned 61 percent of GM after its 2009 bailout of the automaker, sold shares equal to a 28 percent stake during the IPO. In a January interview, Ron Bloom, who was head of the Obama administration’s auto-industry task force at the time of the IPO, said the government wanted to sell its GM shares “as soon as practical.”

DETROIT — The recent surge in General Motors Co.’s stock price bodes well for the company’s goal to cut ties with the U.S. government, said Ron Bloom, U.S. Treasury’s point person on GM.

Mr. Bloom said in an interview Tuesday that the Obama administration is pleased with the auto maker’s share performance and “serious” about selling the remainder of its stake in the company.

GM and its stock underwriters are increasingly optimistic that the Treasury will sell most or all of its remaining stake next year, rather than offloading shares gradually over the next few years, reported The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Treasury reduced its GM stake to 26.5 percent from 61 percent in November’s $23.1 billion GM initial public stock offering.

“At some point we are going to sell the remainder of our shares, so [the stock price increase] is a good thing,” Mr. Bloom said. “The size of the initial IPO ought to give people some indication that we are serious about exiting as soon as practicable.”

Before the IPO, GM Chief Executive Daniel Akerson said he had expected the Treasury could take several years to sell its stake.

Banks underwriting the stock sale and GM executives would prefer to see the government cut ties with GM more quickly, according to people familiar with the matter. GM’s government ties, while dramatically reduced from a year ago, remain a turnoff to some potential investors and customers, they worry. Chrysler Group LLC, also a bailout recipient part-owned by the government, has echoed that sentiment.

Mr. Bloom said the Treasury will balance its desire to exit from GM with an obligation to recoup as much as possible of the government’s $50 billion bailout of GM. He said too much uncertainty remains around GM’s performance and the health of the overall auto market to know whether the Treasury could meet its objectives with major stock sale in 2011.

“If the stock price goes down, we would then be reporting a larger loss [on the government stake] and that would be an issue which we would have to take into account,” Mr. Bloom said. “Investing in private companies is best done by private investors and getting out has a broad benefit for the financial markets. We are of course also mindful of our commitment to taxpayers.”

The Treasury needs to sell it remaining GM shares at an average price of $53 each to break even on the bailout. GM shares were trading at $38.91 at midafternoon Tuesday, compared with the $33 IPO price.

Mr. Bloom declined to comment on his future in the Obama administration. He has been in the running for a new position overseeing the White House’s manufacturing policy.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury said Wednesday that General Motors Co. had completed the repurchase of preferred stock issued to the government as part of the car maker’s U.S. bailout last year.

In late October, the Obama administration announced that GM would buy back $2.1 billion in preferred stock held by the Treasury, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The stock had been issued under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was created in 2008 to support companies stung by the financial crisis.

In its release announcing the completion of the repurchase, the Treasury said the total amount of funds taxpayers have received in return for their investment in GM exceeds $23 billion, including proceeds of the company’s initial public stock offering last month.

The Treasury said it invested $49.5 billion in GM. Its remaining stake in the auto maker consists of 500 million shares of common stock.

The U.S. Treasury said today it received an additional $1.8 billion in proceeds from General Motors Co.’s initial public offering after the company’s underwriters exercised an option to sell more common stock, The Detroit News reported.

The additional sale brings the total money raised by the government in GM’s IPO to $13.5 billion and reduces the treasury’s stake in the automaker to 33 percent. That’s down from 61 percent before the initial sale.

GM’s underwriting banks had 30 days after the company’s stock started trading on Nov. 18 to sell up to 15 percent more in common stock shares. The sale closed today, bringing the total number of common stock shares sold by the government to 412 million.

With the additional stock sale, GM’s IPO in total brought in $23.1 billion, the world’s largest IPO ever.

“General Motors’ IPO is a testament to that company’s turnaround and the significant progress we have made continuing to exit our investments and recover taxpayer dollars,” said Tim Massad, acting assistant secretary for financial stability, in a statement.

WASHINGTON – U.S. taxpayers are about $10 billion in the red on their General Motors Co. investment after Wednesday’s initial public offering. Whether the Treasury can ultimately break even will depend on how GM shares perform over the next few years, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The Treasury Department agreed Wednesday to sell 358.5 million of its common shares in GM at $33 a share, senior Obama administration officials said.

That sale raised $11.8 billion for U.S. taxpayers. It also valued the Treasury’s entire 61 percent stake in GM – including the shares it sold – at about $30 billion.

The Treasury paid about $40 billion for the 912 million common shares it held at the start of the day Wednesday. To get that all back at once, the Treasury would have had to sell all its shares at about $43.85 in the IPO.

After the IPO, the Treasury Department retains about a 37 percent stake in GM. The remaining 554 million common shares the government owns have an indicated value of about $18.3 billion at Wednesday’s IPO price.

The Treasury can’t sell any additional shares for the next six months under the terms of the IPO.

To recover its full investment in GM, the government’s remaining stake would need to reach a value of about $28.2 billion, or nearly $51 a share, on average. The Treasury is expected to sell off its remaining shares over time based on market prices.

The U.S. poured a total of $49.5 billion into GM last year to usher the Detroit auto maker through bankruptcy reorganization. The government has since recouped about $9.5 billion of that money as GM repaid loans, made interest payments and repurchased preferred stock from Treasury.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday said General Motors’s initial public offering marks a “major milestone” not just for the company but for the entire American auto industry.

Mr. Obama has touted the administration’s investment in GM, saying it saved hundreds of jobs at a time when the economy was on the brink of collapse. “Supporting the American auto industry required tough decisions and shared sacrifices,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. He added, “But it helped save jobs, rescue an industry at the heart of America’s manufacturing sector, and make it more competitive for the future.”

Senior Obama administration officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, said the administration’s decision to sell at a price below break-even reflected an urgency to get the U.S. government out of the auto business. The extraordinary government intervention at GM has been politically problematic for the administration, and GM officials have expressed concern that the government ties have hurt sales.

Treasury officials said they are aiming to recover as much money as possible with future sales of GM shares.

“We believe that proper balance was found” in finding a share price that returned taxpayer money while quickly exiting GM, said one administration official. “We view this as an important major milestone in our long-announced objective to exit this investment as soon as practicable.”

General Motors Co. aims to raise as much as $10.6 billion in an initial public offering that will reduce the U.S. and Canadian governments’ stakes in the largest U.S. carmaker, two people familiar with the plan told Bloomberg.

GM, 61 percent owned by the U.S. Treasury Department, will offer 365 million shares at $26 to $29 each, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The automaker also will offer $2 billion to $3 billion of preferred shares that later will become common stock, said the people.

CEO Dan Akerson is working toward returning the $50 billion GM received in a taxpayer bailout last year. The Treasury, seeking to win higher prices in future offerings, is selling less than the $12 billion to $16 billion that people familiar with the situation said Detroit-based GM and its investment banks had considered earlier.

“This makes sense,” George Magliano, a senior economist for IHS Automotive who is based in New York, said in an interview yesterday. “They need to protect the price of the offering. The IPO was never intended to buy out all of the government and union stakes in one fell swoop. It’s got to be done over time, and you need to get the right price.”

An amended registration statement that contains the number of shares and the price range for the offering will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as soon as today, an election day in the U.S., one of the people said.

For the United States to break even, it needs to sell at an average price, before splits, of $131 a share, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg in September.

With a 3-for-1 split, the stock would need to rise to almost $43.67 a share — almost 60 percent more than the midpoint of the planned offering — to reach the breakeven point, said a person familiar with the planning.

The suggested offering price would value GM at three times Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, while Ford Motor Co. trades at five times that measure, said the person. The discount should ensure the offering is over-subscribed and may lead to a jump in the price when trading begins Nov. 18, the person said.

Bonds issued by GM’s bankrupt predecessor dropped. The 8.375 percent bonds due July 2033, which were issued by old General Motors Corp. and convert to shares in the new GM, fell 3.5 cents to 33.5 cents on the dollar at 9:43 a.m. in New York, according to Trace, the bond-pricing service of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

GM’s offering range values the company at about $50 billion to $60 billion, Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist and economist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, wrote today in a note.

The U.S. Treasury will likely sell about $7 billion of stock, one of the people said. About $2 billion of shares will be sold by the United Auto Workers retiree health-care trust, and less than $1 billion may be sold by Canada, one of the people said.

The medical trust’s sale would be worth about 25 percent of its stake, while Canada will sell about 20 percent of its shares, one of the people said.

The offering may price on Nov. 17 and the shares would begin trading the following day, the person said. A roadshow in which GM will pitch investors in North America and Europe will begin tomorrow or Nov. 4, the person said.

Noreen Pratscher, a spokeswoman for GM, didn’t respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

“It’s all up to the company” when it files with the SEC and begins its roadshow, said Steven Adamske, a spokesman for the Treasury department.