That was a really weird article. When was it from? I'm still confused.
My memory is hazy, because at the time I was in the car mentality of "lol! v-tec sux Ford's 4.6 v8 dix" "Toyota, El Camino, GNX blah blah blah." So, I'm probably not the most reliable source for this. But as I remember it, it was post bailout, either when the government was taking over GM and its assets or when old GM was transitioning into new GM. From what I understand, contracts were being rewritten, loans and debts were being renogotiated, assets were being bought and sold, and people thought it would be a good idea to buy GM stock because it was cheap. The problem was, GM as a company was gonna become a completely different entity, legally speaking, so for some reason GM and the government said GM stocks weren't good for anything, so they told people (multiple times actually) to stop buying GM's stocks. If that's not confusing, the real question I have that maybe you could answer is why they didn't either A) stop selling the stocks altogether or B) make the stocks worth a piece of new GM? Both of those options sound reasonable to me.
My guess is that there was so much crazy shit going on about that time that it was the ad-hoc solution arrived at by the SEC, GM and the NYSE (think GM trades on NYSE). There's an HBO movie called Too Big To Fail that, while not the best overview of the financial crisis of 2008, paints a much better picture of the regulatory shitstorm that ensued than any of the other books. While The Big Short very much shows the perspective of the traders, Too Big To Fail is pretty much a top-down view from the perspective of Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson. Remember when we airlifted pallets of $100 bills into Iraq for no demonstrably good reason? The 2008 bailout of General Motors et. al. had a lot of the same charcteristics.
So, basically, they were making stuff up as they go along while at the same time showing off that they could do things just because they could? I actually find that somewhat comical for some reason. In all seriousness though, I hope we've learned some kind of lesson out of all of this. It'd be pretty hard not to.
The problem is that economics is a social science so lesson learned is subject to fashion. They will teach you in History about how the New Deal saved America; they will teach you in economics that it prolonged the depression, but only if you get a teacher who believes Friedman. This is why Piketty went back to France.
All good points I agree with. Additional to learn lessons one needs to admit failure, the the moment japan is touting their economic policy as a success. The fashionable lesson right now is that bailouts and helicopter money drops work to boost the economy.