THE MARKET’S BIGGEST WINNER last week just might have been General Motors, if only because the auto maker finally made it back to Wall Street after a searing trip through bankruptcy court. GM (ticker: GM), which parked a Camaro in front of the New York Stock Exchange to herald its return, priced 475 million common shares at $33 apiece. The stock opened above 35 but ended the week at 34.26, endowing the new GM with a market value of more than $50 billion. The government was a lesser winner, pocketing only about $14 billion of the $49.5 billion it had ponied up last year to save the struggling company.

Including GM, new stock issues and secondary offerings totaled $24.6 billion last week, the second-heaviest week for stock issuance since Dec. 18, 2009. While a more receptive market is a good sign for investors, JPMorgan says the fresh supply of stock likely weighed on the market, especially as actively managed U.S. investment accounts have seen $1.6 billion of outflows in the past four weeks.

As for the broad market, there was lots of activity but little change in prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up just 0.1%, to 11,203.55 for the five trading sessions, after tumbling about 1.6% Tuesday and regaining the same percentage Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.7% at 2518.12.

“It was a weird week,” says Michael Purves, chief equity strategist and head of derivatives research at BGC Financial in New York. “Thursday was a test, arguably a trap for bulls who may regret it next week. There may be forces of continued selling into any rally. Investors want to lock in gains if they are up for the year and reconnoiter after things settle down.”

Thomas J. Lee, equity strategist at JPMorgan, says the week that just past amounted to a “healthy but harrowing” pause. Lee thinks economic data is showing strong cyclical momentum, from jobless claims of 439,000 reported last week, in line with expectations, to retail sales rising 0.4% in October (excluding autos and gas), double the Street’s forecast.

THE WORLD’S POLICY MAKERS NO LONGER are pulling their oars in the same direction. The market’s mid-week setback owed in part to fears of a looming sovereign-debt crisis in Ireland and talk of China’s plans to tighten credit, even as the Federal Reserve is adding to the U.S. money supply. The Fed even stole a minute from all its quantitative easing to order a second round of bank stress tests early next year, just to prove that the nation’s largest bank-holding companies can withstand “adverse economic conditions.”

Investors didn’t take the news well; the Keefe, Bruyette & Woods bank-stock index slumped 2.3% on the week.

For good measure, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation highlighted 50 criminal investigations into former bank employees. And two more of associates of Bernard Madoff were arrested (Source: Barrons Online).