Years ago today. Happy anniversary to us. Im melissa lee with carl and jim cramer and david faber live from the new york stock exchange. Lets look at how were setting up after yesterdays rally. Particular strength in yesterdays rally. We didnt get housing starts, thats earlier today. As for the picture in europe, really the stand outout here is the euro. Greece getting a five notch upgrade at the s p. Our road map this morning starts with gm. Government motors no more. The treasury to exit its stake in the next 12 to 18 months, purchasing 2 million shares by the end of this month. Another challenging quarter for fedex with the blame squarely on sandy. But the stock is up premarket. Oracle posts a Strong Quarter with Even Stronger guidance. The season rebound in europe. No impact from the fiscal cliff. And ge gets boosted from ubss key call list on the weaker than expected macro environment. Still on the list is including well tell you in a couple of minutes. General motors is up sharply in the premarket session. The Treasury Department says it intends to sell the rest of its stakes in gm in the next 12 to 15 months. The automaker will buy back 200 million shares from treasury for 27. 50 a share. Treasury says it plans to sell its other remaining shares through various means in an orderly fashion. Timothy masssad will join us later. This could be a buy signal with the government signaling it is in fact out. I think people are looking at what happened with aig, and saying, once you get rid of the overhang, its off to the races. I know tims a classmate of mine at law school. He said, listen, well do our best to be able to get out and not bang the people who bought it at the ipo. Still, its a premium. I think the premium is the government doing well. And i think it does help all the remaining shareholders. Its also a theme were starting to hear more about, which is the return of capital theme. When you are opened in part by the government or regulated highly by the government, ala the banks, you have not been able to return all the capital. With what were hearing about the banks for next year, in terms of their ability under their ability to return or increase dividends and potentially repurchase more shares. And then today with gm. A company that had enormous amounts of cash on its Balance Sheets. After the government bailout it was ready for armageddon. It didnt come. Its been sitting there they werent able to earn any on the part of cash for liquidity. Why not, shrink the cap, increase earnings per share. Shareholders have been waiting. They just added credit lines last month. It will be interesting to see what other shackles come off. Are corporate jets back, are executive compensations back, rules that we know were a source of friction between treasury and management. Dont get too giddy, though, immediately for shareholders, it reduces the shares outstanding by 11 . Reduce the shares, of course, increases your earnings per share. Maybe thats why in part the stock is trading higher today. Seems like a rational response. Oh, yeah. I spoke to a couple of shareholders who had been in there because of this story. Were expecting it to perhaps be a bit higher than it is this morning. The one thing i would point out is there is a air of good feeling for a lot of these stocks. Johnson this morning announced better than expected earnings. Ford motor said if we could cut back europe, we would have a dramatic increase in earnings. Gm is a couple quarters behind ford. But these are powerhouses. Youve got to go back to if you go back to the old days before gm got in trouble, when the Balance Sheet got distended, you had a company that had gigantic earnings power. It could happen again. I think people are saying, give me a proxy for world growth. China coming back. Gm rationalizing europe. Gm europe, when you say a couple quarters behind ford, are you saying progress in the quarterly financials . Committed to rationalizing europe. Again, a larger theme of excess capitalization at u. S. Corporations, and the fact that so much money is sitting on Balance Sheets doing nothing. Did you read oracle . How much money do they have. They bought back 10 billion worth of stock. These companies, you read through their stories, and you say, not only did they not extend themselves during this downturn, they conserved a lot of cash. By the way, humans did, too, in america. Have you seen the numbers that the Federal Reserve put out last night about how much money is being how little debt is being taken down by citizens. Were back to levels of the 90s. Federal Household Debt service came out last night. The percentage of disposable income is 14 , down to 10 . Thats 1994 levels. Thats a big part of Morgan Stanleys call on citi today. From overweight to equal weight. Consumer deleveraging in their view coming to an end. And the more clarity on regulations. We are exiting this really weird period of uncertainty. Rules come into focus. And if these consumer Balance Sheet numbers are right. Next year could look different, jim. Yes. There are a lot of assets look, a lot of bad loans that are becoming good loans. Citi was always relatively opaque. I tried many, many times to penetrate citi holdings, which is the legacy of the core running it now. It may be good. I mean, pandit always promised me the money in holdings was money good. If you go to the book value of Companies Like morgan stanley, 9 of book i mean, in other words, what im saying is, xlf, look out. 14 to 16 from june to now. But it could go back to a much higher level. You wonder about the nominations to treasury, good time to get out of the business. Righting the ship, moving on to Something Else . Elizabeth arden, now senatorelect on the banking committee, has always intimated if you wanted to know who did it right, not someone who was gouged, someone who is a respectable banker, the only name she would tell you is ken straw. It is entirely possible that ive been pushing for dave coty. But schenault is the banker. I think thats probably true. Theres a lot of people being floated here. Your name in there at all . I have not come up. Not just because i have trigger finger, im just going to bring it out. People say, what is that about. Im listed im questionable right now for sunday. I could be listed as probable. You know i play for the patriots. Sure. I am a patriot. I play tor the patriots. We will not see him start a game again. But i did see him in a restaurant. That whole model thing, daniel craig kind of thing, not happening. 50 turnovers in two seasons, more than any other nfl player. A great tweet this morning said, holy cow, hes a machine. Hes a turnover machine. Meantime, fedex reporting fiscal quarter profits. Impact of Hurricane Sandy at 11 cents a share for the quarter. Revenues above forecast and largely short of estimates. Its full year forecast comes in the current range of street estimates. The core express business, guys, their words, persistence weakness, down 33 . Fedex ground fraet this is another one of these bad news good news stories. If you read the headline, you say this is horrendous. But if you think the worlds coming back, i mean, they talk about asia not being good. But wait a second, if asia comes back, look at the chinese market. If it comes back, maybe this is the play, and oil is stable. I find that many stories that look bad in a world that was declining suddenly are good. The other thing to keep in mind is they outline the sandy impact is 11 cents per quarter. If you back that out, its still tops of the forecast they gave back in september. Internally it was a beat, if you take out the impact of sandy. So that also can be construed as good news, or maybe not as bad as the headline number might appear at least. Very much so. They still announced a lot of voluntary cuts. Trying to cut costs by 1. 7 billion a year, within three years. That was one of the caveats. People knew going in that you know whats interesting, look at the trading. We talked about this, david, the stock never broke the 83, 84. Then they get a second announcement that was disappointing. It went from 84 to 86. Heres a company that people institutions love to own. Theyre always looking for transport. The transports look like theyre breaking out. And this is the one they love to gravitate to. Because they know its rough in the economy. Theyve always done right by the shareholders. Every bad news has elevated the stock in the last three months. Counterintuitive, but it is happening. You mentioned the baltic dry index, down 30 in the past two weeks. I think there are expectations things not looking so good in terms of shipping in general. So is max index, up rather dramatically in the last three weeks. Were getting a lot of cross conferences here. O it jumped to 14,000 last week, which is rather high. It was 100,000 before the crisis. I tried to rent one of these for a party before it got to 6,000. A party . Why not. Put it near the red hook, and youve got a couple of football field space for a couple nights. You know how much it is to rent a hall . Rent a tanker. You have that many friends to fill a tanker . I have many acquaintances, very few friends. Sounds like a rave party to me. Something out of mad max. I like to keep everyone else in the tanker. Lets check out shares of oracle. Theyre rising premarket trade. The business provide said it earned 50 cents a share beating wall street estimates. Revenues also above consensus for the current quarter. Sees new Software Sales rising 3 po 13 for the current quarter. Companies might pull back on business spending because of the fiscal cliff. Oracle yesterday, jim, on the conference call, they pulled a honey badger. Dont care about europe, dont care about the fiscal cliff, because theyre not seeing it in the results. Ooh, larvae. The cfo said, i love her, as you can see in our numbers, people want to continue to spend their budgets. They have a wonderful december so far, december to remember. And the 7. 5 billion acquisition was proven to be the strategic most strategic and profitable thing oracle has ever done. Talking about the just macys, time warner cable, expedia, vodafone and walmart. Now allison comes out and says it has turned the corner. We are turning the corner on hardware. Crm and sap, theyre at a 52week high. It will be an interesting challenge to those guys today. I loved that allison mentioned sap. He wont even utter the term sailsforce. Com. My hat is off to that team for what i regard as being the first really big think tank in terms of whats going on in tech. Its an umbrella for a lot of stocks. All right. Up next, well talk with the treasury official at the center of the governments plan. Selling the remaining stake in General Motors. Take one more look at futures. Weve had two tripledigit rallies backtoback. Havent done that since the end of july. And futures are up once again this morning. More squawk on the street in just a moment. Live from capitol hill today. Encouraging lawmakers to rise above gridlock. Treasury announcing its going to sell its stake in gm in the next 12 to 15 months. Selling shares back at 27. 50 a share. On the phone with us is tim massa, known as t. A. R. P. , of course. Great to have you. Tim, whats the strategy overall here from a Portfolio Management side of things . You guys are winding down. Are you willing to take a loss on gm because you took such a big gain on aig . Well, thanks for having me, first of all. Lets remember, we didnt make this investment to make a profit. We made it to save the American Auto industry. Which was on the verge of a collapse and would have resulted in 1 million jobs being lost. The investments were incredibly successful in that regard. But with respect to how we manage it, this is an unprecedented deal. Were getting a premium to the market price in a share repurchase. This is a higher price than we would have ever been able to get. The stock, you know, hasnt even traded above 27 during periods when we could sell. As recently as july, it was 18 and change. So we think this is a terrific deal for the taxpayer. And we still have 300 million shares that well sell out over the next 12 to 15 months. And we can benefit from any potential upside there. Tim, jim cramer, how you been . Good, jim. All right. Tim, i know you wanted to try to get the ipo price. Im trying to figure out, how do you measure your role in this, in that obviously youre a gm shareholder, so you dont want them to overpay for anything, but you also want the taxpayer to get overpaid, so to speak, from the current price. How did you resolve that . How did you get it to 27 . Were at 27. 50. It was a discussion with gm, and basically they came to us with a compelling proposal that they were willing to buy shares at a premium. And we negotiated over that. So we think its a great deal all around. Its great for the taxpayer, and i think the stock price will react positively to this. It removes it eliminates the uncertainty as to how the government will exit. Because now weve made it clear. And as i say, we can still benefit from potential upside from the future. Tim, over the next 12 to 15 months, is there any hope on the part of treasury that you will even get close to the breakeven price of 15 a share . Well see what the market does and what the company does. But we recognize there are costs to this investment. But lets remember, the costs are far less than the costs had we not acted. And we have been successful overall with all the t. A. R. P. Investments. All the t. A. R. P. Investments considered as a whole will result in a gain to the taxpayer. The other thing is, were winding all of them down. You know, we expect to basically have the program substantially wound down over the next 12 to 15 months. Weve already made great progress in doing that. Tim, with the liberalization of rules regarding management, we mentioned corporate jets and corporate comp earlier in the show. We agreed to waive a few covenants that were a carryover from the loan agreements and when he had a majority ownership of the company. This is the wind down philosophy here of removing any perception that, you know, the overhang is the problem. So thats why we agreed to that. And tim, finally, on gm itself, stock trading 27. 60 this morning. Youve got the good price for your shareholders, so to speak, with quotes. And of the shareholders who are benefiting. If you could get out at 29 or 30 soon, because there might be a lot of demand for this thing as we head into early next year, would you just get out entirely if the opportunity arises . Were going to do this in an orderly fashion. We expect to commence a dribbleout program, and we think that provides the certainty that the market needs. Whats a dribbleout program . Youll just sell a little bit out at a time . Well sell a little bit at a time, each day. Jim, different from aig, youre going to be in there offering stock . Well, this is similar to, you know, what we did with our citi shares. Where we basically dribbled it out over a period of time. The company is still the companys made dramatic changes and improvements. And we think theres still potential upside here. Theyre rolling out new models, which i think hopefully will be warmly received. Theyre addressing their challenges in europe. So we think this is a good strategy. Its also consistent with our overall winddown plans for t. A. R. P. Were going to wiped down here as well. Tim massad, always appreciate your thoughts. Thank you for having me. Tim massad runs t. A. R. P. Find out how the mad dash turns out next. High heels, the holidays, and milk. What do they all have in common . Well talk live with both the president s and Vice President s of shoe maker manolo. [ male announcer ] you are a business pro. Omnipotent of opportunity. You know how to mix business. With business. And you. Rent from national. Because only national lets you choose any car in the aisle. And go. You can even take a fullsize or above. And still pay the midsize price. I could get used to this. [ male announcer ] yes, you could business pro. Yes, you could. Go national. Go like a pro. Time for the mad dash, as we watch the cast of the nutcracker come on the trading floor. Theyll ring the bell in a few moments here. Lets point out, heres what i thinks important. Jeffrey amel, ceo, very conservative. He talked about a series of what we think you could argue that they were too aggressive. Talk about health care not being as good. Appliances not being as good. Energy pushed back possible, big acquisition. The stock has had a pretty good run. I regard it as being a true estimate trim on the idea that maybe things cant be that great out there. Do you sell it . I would not sell it. Other things that stay on that list, by the way, lowes, key corp, u. S. Bank corp, time warner. U. S. Bank corp downgraded by morgan stanley. I think its a really terrific bank. I had them on tv. I would not sell that either. Lets talk General Mills. Ken pal really came out today and said this thing, its right. Were starting to do it. Re unites yogu he cites yogurt as being great. He pointed out the consumer is doing better, the numbers are good. This is not an expensive stock. It is a sleep at night stock. Those of you at home that desire a stock you can actually put away, i dont like buy and hold, General Mills has been a pretty good buy and hold stock, though. What ken does that i like so much is when its bad, its still smooth. Okay . This is my kick the can down the road time. This is a General Motors tie. All in one mad dash. The return of the gems. Day of the generals. Very nice. We have the cast of the nutcracker about to ring the opening bell. And when we come back, we talk facebook. Who is going to jump into the ipo waters in 2013. That subject coming up in just three minutes. [ engine revs ] [ male announcer ] the mercedesbenz winter event is back, with the perfect vehicle thats just right for you, no matter which list youre on. [ santa ] ho, ho, ho, ho [ male announcer ] lease a 2013 c250 for 349 a month at your local mercedesbenz dealer. He loves risk. But whether hes climbing everest, scuba diving the Great Barrier reef with sharks, or jumping into the market, he goes with people he trusts, which is why he trades with a company that doesnt nickel and dime him with hidden fees. So he can worry about other things, like what the market is doing and being ready, no matter what happens, which isnt rocket science. Its just common sense, from td ameritrade. The opening bell for this wednesday. The cast of new york city balle