What a difference a year makes.  This morning, General Motors announced second quarter earnings of $1.3 billion.  That would seem to be good news for American taxpayers, who own the majority of the automaker.  The Takeaway's Celeste Headley spoke with New York Times auto reporter Nick Bunkley shortly after the report came out:

And now we have the news that Edward Whitacre, who took over as CEO of General Motors at the beginning of the year, is stepping down at the end of the month.  The move is not inconsistent with Whitacre's public statements all along that he would go back into retirement once righting the ship at GM, but does the second quarter turnaround suggest all is well with GM?  Fortune's Alex Taylor III writes that Whitacre's replacement, Dan Akerson, has his work cut out for him:

The biggest risk for GM going forward is a slowing of the economy in the U.S and the rest of the world. Car buying is directly connected to consumer confidence, which in turn is connected to unemployment. As long as the jobless rate stays stuck in the high single digits, car sales are likely to remain at low levels.

Such macroeconomic factors are expected to weigh heavily on any GM IPO. Since the automobile industry is a cyclical slow-growth business, professional investors treat auto stocks as trading vehicles -- not long-term buys. Thus they buy them in anticipation of a turnaround in the economy when prices are lowest, and then sell them as their prospects improve.

But since the global economy appears to be headed downward, or at least flattening out, there is little reason for the usual investors to buy the shares, making the timing for an immediate GM IPO less than optimum -- especially with a new CEO at the helm.

Read Ed Whitacre drops a monkey wrench in a GM IPO here.