SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, May 17 (Reuters) – Facebook Inc is set to raise up to $ 18.4 billion in its IPO and become the first U.S. company to be worth more than $ 100 billion at its debut, as investors bet on a big pop in the stock when it begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday.

Frenzied demand, especially from individual investors hoping to buy into an Internet juggernaut that touches hundreds of millions of people every day, is expected to drive Facebook well above its initial public offering price of $ 38 a share, which was already at the top end of its target of $ 34 to $ 38.

Analysts were divided on how high the price might go on the first day of trade, with some expecting a relatively modest gain of 10 percent to 20 percent while others said anything short of a 50 percent jump would be disappointing.

“It will be bananas tomorrow,” said Greencrest Capital analyst Max Wolff. “This is all about the future, so it really
is a lottery ticket.

“The stock could initially rise and then it could go parabolic on a wave of retail investor hope. These shares are
going to trade on hope. I do not know how to value hope,” said Wolff.

Facebook is selling an up to 18 percent stake in the company at a valuation of $ 104 billion, comparable to the market worth of Amazon.com Inc, and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

The highly anticipated offering, the largest by a U.S. Internet company and the second-largest in U.S. history after Visa Inc, vaults the eight-year-old Facebook to the front ranks of corporate America.

It will give 28-year-old Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, a net worth of
nearly $ 20 billion.

Enthusiasm for Facebook shares comes despite questions about the company’s long-term money-making capabilities, particularly after it reported a quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in April.

Others warn that the price tag, equivalent to over 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc’s 14 times and Google Inc’s 19 times, makes Facebook a risky bet.

“I think they’ll make money – it will just take them a little bit longer because they’re pioneering new ways for advertisers to reach customers,” said Walter Price, a portfolio manager at RCM Capital Management. “It’s not like there’s a simple formula. They have to try different things.”

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to people that the growth rate is going to moderate over the next couple of years,” he said, adding that he expects the stock to trade at around $ 42 on Friday, which would be an 11 percent gain.

HAVES, AND HAVE-NOTS

Wall Street’s top brokerages fought tooth-and-nail to ensure their wealthiest and most reliable clients got a slice of the IPO. Those with big accounts and a long history as customers likely got first dibs, and would-be buyers who had no such ties were lucky to get any, industry sources said.

A Morgan Stanley Smith Barney adviser based in the northeast said he saw internal figures that showed the firm had more than 60,000 orders for the IPO from 6,600 brokers in over 570 offices – eclipsing a more typical 500 brokers in 300 offices.

The brokerage arm of Morgan Stanley — the lead underwriter on the IPO and therefore expected to get the most shares — initially capped the number each retail client account could receive to 500 shares, which was lower than Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s ceiling of 2,000 shares.

But Morgan Stanley Smith Barney emailed its wealth advisers late on Thursday afternoon to say that it had raised the cap to 5,000 shares, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I am sure they were getting calls,” said Alois Pirker, research director at Aite Group LLC. “One of the advantages of being a lead underwriter is that you get preferential treatment. I am sure there were some wealthy individuals who were wondering if it would be better to be with Merrill Lynch.”

A spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a venture with Citigroup Inc, declined to comment.

For most retail investors, their first chance to invest in Facebook, which has some 900 million users, will be on Friday, when they risk getting trampled by institutional funds.

Financial advisers are warning that if the stock skyrockets, the average person might end up getting orders filled at a price much higher than they wanted and then face the possibility of losses as funds steamroll in and then zip back out, taking the price off its highs.

But these warnings are largely falling on deaf ears.

“A lot of retail investors are not concerned about valuation. That’s what is going to drive the first-day pop,” said Jim Krapfel, analyst at Morningstar. “I think anything over 50 percent will be considered a successful offering — anything under that would be underwhelming.”

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Facebook shares will begin trading at around 11 a.m. on Friday, when the well-known brand could attract enough interest to exceed the 458 million shares traded the day General Motors went public after emerging from bankruptcy in 2010.

Facebook will celebrate its Wall Street debut with an all-night “hackathon” at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.

Zuckerberg, fictionalized in the Oscar-winning 2010 film “The Social Network,” will control roughly 56 percent of the company’s voting shares after the offering.

His majority control has raised flags among some investors, uneasy with ceding so much power to the “hoodie”-wearing
executive who wrote in a letter to potential shareholders that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

Facebook also faces challenges maintaining its growth momentum. Some investors worry the company has not yet figured out a way to make money from the growing number of users who access Facebook on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, revenue growth from Facebook’s online advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, has slowed in recent months.

One UBS adviser initially received calls from 12 clients clamoring to buy shares of Facebook, but over the past couple of weeks, two have changed their minds.

“A lot of people are thrown off by the recent negative stories in the press,” the adviser said, speaking on condition
of anonymity. “One guy was worried about General Motors stopping its advertising on Facebook.”

GM said on Tuesday it would stop placing ads on Facebook, raising questions about whether display ads on the site are as effective as traditional media.

Overall, financial advisers are struggling to manage clients’ expectations about what the stock will do and in some cases, if they will be able to get any stock for them.

This week, Facebook increased the size of its IPO by almost 25 percent to 421 million shares, or a 15 percent stake in the company — a day after hiking its target price range about 14 percent.

If a greenshoe option for underwriters is exercised, as expected, the stake sold increases to 18 percent, raising north
of $ 18.4 billion. More than half of the proceeds of the IPO will go to existing shareholders, including early backers such as Accel Partners and Russia’s DST Global.

The more bullish had expected Facebook to price at $ 40 per share. However, the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by more than 2 percent on Thursday, quelling such optimism.

“I expect it to open at a nice premium, but I don’t expect a LinkedIn-type performance because of the sheer size of this IPO,” said Scott Sweet of research firm IPO Boutique.

Shares of professional networking company LinkedIn Corp doubled on their first day of trading.

Lee Simmons, industry specialist at Dun & Bradstreet, forecast a 10 percent to 20 percent gain for Facebook on Friday.

“You’ve got a large offering at an increased price, so a huge pop may be difficult to achieve,” Simmons said. “When you’re talking about doubling or a pop the size of LinkedIn…, the others were smaller floats, under 10 percent, so you had
this artificial feeding frenzy.”

Facebook has 33 underwriters for the IPO, led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

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Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

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MARTINS FERRY, Ohio — Vice President Joe Biden says the business background that Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney touts on the campaign trail doesn’t necessarily make him fit to run a country.

Campaigning in Ohio for his boss, President Barack Obama, Biden said a company president has to answer to investors while the U.S. president must answer to the entire country – not just one segment of it.

Biden said looking out for the U.S. is what good Democratic and Republican presidents have done.

Romney’s chief campaign argument is that his business background makes him better suited than Obama to turn around the economy and create jobs.

Aides say Romney had a net job creation record in the private sector and as Massachusetts governor.

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Multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer has an important message for those who think the rich are America’s job creators. Problem is, he can’t seem to get it out.

“For thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of the universe. It’s not, and an astronomer who still believed that it was, would do some lousy astronomy,” Hanauer said at a March 1 speech, according to the Atlantic. “In the same way, a policy maker who believed that the rich and businesses are ‘job creators’ and therefore should not be taxed, would make equally bad policy.”

(Read the entire speech at The Atlantic)

Hanauer, one of the first nonfamily investors in Amazon.com, shared this argument as part of a talk he gave at the TED University conference. Now, the organizers of TED — a movement aimed at bringing attention to “ideas worth spreading” — is refusing to share Hanauer’s talk on the internet, calling it too “political,” according to the National Journal.

In his talk, Hanauer argued that the rich, people like him in other words, aren’t responsible for the bulk of America’s job creation and therefore shouldn’t receive tax breaks to help them create jobs. Instead, he noted that middle-class consumers are more likely to create jobs by spending and spurring businesses to hire. Brandishing a chart comparing millionaires’ effective tax rates to the unemployment rate over time, Hanauer noted that a drop in the tax rates of the super rich hasn’t meant a drop in the unemployment rate (h/t Business Insider).

“If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs,” he said in the talk, according to the Atlantic. “And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.”

It may seem odd that TED won’t distribute Hanauer’s talk just because it evokes political tropes, especially since the TED website features talks from actual politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron and former Vice President Al Gore.

In addition, Hanauer’s remarks shouldn’t have been too much of a shock to TED organizers, considering that he’s been an outspoken critic of the notion that lowering taxes on the rich will help create jobs. In December, Hanauer penned an op-ed for Bloomberg, which included many of the same arguments featured in his TED talk. It even used some of the exact same language.

Check out the slides from Hanauer’s talk below:

TED 2012 More Slides Final1

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ATLANTA — A sleek new $ 1.4 billion international terminal featuring airy windows and eye-popping artwork opened Wednesday at the world’s busiest airport in hopes of positioning Atlanta to attract more globe-trotting travelers.

The sparkling launching pad has been in the works for more than a decade at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Besides helping to grab its share of the lucrative and growing international market, officials also hope the vast new terminal convinces Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc. and other carriers to route more flights through the city.

“It’s really going to open up new opportunities for Atlanta to grow,” said airport general manager Louis Miller. “It’s going to become a gateway not just to Atlanta, but to the world.”

It’s been a somewhat bumpy ride for the project.

It took four years to build, in part because it’s so expansive that workers had to carve out a new entrance on a busy highway. It also came at a time when Delta is cutting back slightly on international flights to control rising fuel costs. Legal challenges threatened to derail it, and millions had to be spent on new signs simply to make sure travelers could find the place.

Mayor Kasim Reed said the massive investment of $ 1 billion in municipal bonds to be repaid by passenger fees and another $ 400 million picked up by the airlines will reap dividends long-term.

“This magnificent facility is an economic catalyst for the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia and the entire southeastern United States, and it will help create jobs and new business opportunities for years to come,” he said in a statement.

The project is actually two behemoth buildings.

The first is a light-filled terminal with broad glass windows along every wall and separate levels for arriving and departing travelers to help untangle traffic. The second is a new concourse with 12 gates, giving the airport a total of 40 international gates. That will allow airlines to offer new routes and relieve the strain on the airport’s other five concourses that handle 2,500 flights a day.

At Wednesday’s ceremony, hundreds of passengers and airline workers wandered through the buildings, visiting upscale retail outlets, eating at new diners and scoping out the artwork.

“It’s great. It will be more convenient for us,” said Raymond Lu, a 32-year-old chemical salesman from China who was waiting for the terminal’s first departure bound for Tokyo. “It’s easy, it’s very convenient. But it’s very strange being on this flight.”

Some of the more popular features are behind-the-scenes upgrades. One is a new system that ends the baggage re-check process for Atlanta-bound international travelers, who previously had to relinquish their suitcases after clearing customs and then wait for them again at baggage claim. It will cut travel time by 45 minutes to an hour for international flyers whose destination is Atlanta.

The expansion helps Atlanta keep pace with other major international stops. Beijing’s airport, the second-busiest on the planet, built a third runway and a colossal glass-and-steel terminal in time for the 2008 Olympics. And Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the world’s third-busiest, is undergoing a $ 15 billion expansion that will add a new runway and other upgrades.

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Most Popular Entries on HuffingtonPost

* White House/Treasury step up talks

* Discussions signal political impact of big loss

WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) – The White House, following a trading loss of more than $ 2 billion by JPMorgan, wants to ensure a tough interpretation of a regulation aimed at preventing banks from making bets with their own money, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said White House officials have stepped up talks with the Treasury Department in the several days since the staggering loss was disclosed by the bank.

The discussions, according to the report, represent the first tangible political impact from the trading debacle. Obama said this week the huge loss illustrated the need for Wall Street reform and warned that the same kind of error at a less stable bank may have required government intervention.

The issue was one of Obama’s signature domestic policy achievements, but he has faced opposition in trying to implement and enforce it.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Tuesday the rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law would strengthen the ability of banks to absorb losses like those disclosed by JPMorgan last week.

A key provision of the law, the Volcker rule, bans banks from making speculative bets with firm money, but includes an exemption for trades done to hedge risk.

“It is because of the president that the Volcker rule is a part of the law, and our administration has worked since the day it passed to ensure it and the entire law is implemented in a tough and effective way so that taxpayers never again have to bear the burden of risky behavior on Wall Street,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said when asked about the Journal report.

Regulators are crafting the final language of that rule.

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ATHENS, Greece — A senior judge has been sworn in to head Greece’s caretaker government for a month as the debt-crippled country lurches through a political crisis that threatens its membership in the 17-nation eurozone.

The political uncertainty is worrying Greece’s international creditors as well as Greeks themselves, who have withdrawn hundreds of millions of euros from banks since the May 6 election.

Council of State head Panagiotis Pikramenos, 67, was appointed Wednesday to head a government that will lack the mandate to make any binding commitments until a new election, which is expected June 17.

His 16-strong Cabinet will be sworn in Thursday.

About (EURO)700 million ($ 898 million) in deposits have left Greek banks since May 7, the day after the election, President Karolos Papoulias told party leaders after being briefed by central bank governor George Provopoulos.

“The situation in the banks is very difficult,” Papoulias said according to a transcript of the meeting’s minutes released Tuesday night. “Mr. Provopoulos told me that of course there is no panic, but there is great fear which could turn into panic.”

There were no queues at banks in Athens after the May 6 election, but Greeks have been gradually withdrawing their savings over the past two years as the country’s financial crisis deepened, either sending the money abroad or keeping it in their homes.

A Greek banking official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, said the situation with deposit outflows was “calmer” on Wednesday.

Theodore Krintas, managing director of Attica Wealth Management, said he “would expect the population to quietly be doing what it has been doing in the last days.”

“In other words, some of the Greek citizens are afraid and are taking a portion of the money, but I’m not expecting a bank run,” Krintas said.

Despite the country’s financial situation, households and businesses still had (EURO)165 billion deposited in local banks in March, the last month for which Bank of Greece figures are available, compared to about (EURO)237 billion before the crisis broke in late 2009.

The May 6 election saw a massive rise in popularity for parties that advocate pulling out of Greece’s commitments to its international bailout deal, under which it agreed to strict austerity measures in return for billions of euros in rescue loans. The spending cuts and tax hikes have left the country mired in the fifth year of a deep recession and sent unemployment soaring to above 21 percent, and many argue the country cannot hope for recovery if they stick to the deal.

“I want to believe that next time the people will express their opposition to the bailout agreement even more adamantly so that a strong government will be formed without the current parties,” civil servant Christina Papadopoulou said of the repeat ballot.

Negotiations to agree on a coalition government collapsed Tuesday, nine days after voters furious with the handling of the country’s financial crisis deserted the two formerly dominant parties in favor of smaller anti-bailout groups. The election left no party with enough votes for a majority in parliament.

“In a democracy, new elections are the natural consequence of the impossibility of forming a government following an election. It will now be for the Greek people to take a fully informed decision on the alternatives, having in mind that this will be indeed an historic election,” said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

“We will of course respect the democratic decision of the Greek people,” he added. “At the same time, Greek citizens should be aware that there are 16 other democracies in the euro area.”

Greece is being kept afloat by bailout loans from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund, and losing them would lead to state coffers running out of money, including for pensions, health care and salaries. It is unclear how the June election will affect the continued disbursement of the loan installments.

“The Greek people need to know what they are voting for,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Wednesday. “Namely not about party politics but about the future of Greece in Europe and the euro. We hope and expect at the same time that all decision makers in Greece are now aware of their responsibility.

The instability has led to questions about Greece’s prospects of remaining in the euro.

“If the country’s budgetary commitments are not honored, there needs to be appropriate revisions, which means either supplementary financing and additional time, or mechanisms for an exit, which in this case must be orderly,” IMF head Christine Lagarde said on France 24 television.

Greece leaving the euro “is something that would be extremely expensive and would pose great risks, but it is part of the options that we must technically consider.”

But Alexis Tsipras, head of the Radical Left Coalition, or Syriza, which came a surprise second in the May 6 election after campaigning on an anti-bailout platform, maintained that European governments would not dare force Greece out of the euro for fear that would kill the currency union.

“(German Chancellor Angela) Merkel now realizes that if she takes the risk of sending Greece packing, the next day she herself will have to leave the euro,” he told state NET TV late Wednesday.

He added that if creditors cut Greece’s loan lifeline, Athens will stop its debt repayments.

“Our intention is not to take unilateral action, unless we are forced to do so. If they don’t give us the installments, we won’t pay the loansharks,” he said. “Our top priority is to pay salaries and pensions and support a collapsing society.”

Greece now faces a month of inertia, with a government hamstrung by party leaders’ insistence that it can take no binding decisions.

Early Thursday, the government announced that Giorgos Zanias, a top negotiator in Greece’s huge debt writedown deal concluded this year, was appointed the country’s caretaker finance minister.

Zanias is a senior Finance Ministry official and Athens University professor of economics.

Veteran diplomat Petros Molyviatis has been named as foreign minister. He also served as foreign minister in 2004-06.

Tsipras said earlier he had requested “that the caretaker government should not implement measures that would involve further cuts in salaries, pensions and public spending, that would dismantle labor relations or allow privatizations. “

Tsipras said he also asked for a freeze on every ongoing sale of state property.

The Greek privatization fund later said it had already decided to delay until after the election any decisions on the country’s key commitment to sell off some state assets. Under its international bailout agreements, Greece must raise (EURO)19 billion ($ 24.2 billion) through privatizations by 2015 – and has so far raised about (EURO)1.5 billion.

Tsipras is the front runner for the next election. Recent opinion polls have shown him as likely to come first in the June vote, though with nowhere near enough votes to form a government on his own.

The two mainstream parties, conservative New Democracy and socialist PASOK, have warned that anti-bailout policies will lead Greece out of the euro.

“Two courses lie ahead of the Greek people: Either to change everything in Greece – with changes which can be carried out in a Europe that is also changing – or to experience the terror of an exit from the euro, the terror of isolation outside Europe and the collapse of all we have built so far,” said New Democracy head Antonis Samaras.

A win by Tsipras would put him in a dominant position to make a coalition deal with other anti-bailout parties.

“This will make reaching an agreement between the next government and Greece’s international creditors extremely difficult, raising the risk of a Greek exit from the euro and sovereign debt default,” said Robert O’Daly, Senior Economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “The consequences of this would be dire for Greece and probably the rest of the euro area.”

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Derek Gatopoulos in Athens, Geir Moulson and Frank Jordans in Berlin, Raf Casert in Brussels, and Annita Mordechai contributed.

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After the Obama campaign and Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC, targeted Mitt Romney this week over his tenure at Bain Capital, the former Massachusetts governor dismissed the attacks as “off target” and again asserted that he had helped create “over 100,000 jobs.”

“They said, oh, gosh, Gov. Romney at Bain Capital closed down a steel factory. But the problem, of course, is that the steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital,” Romney said Wednesday in an interview with conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, referring to the closure of GST Steel’s Kansas City plant in 2001.

He went on, “One is that we were able to help create over 100,000 jobs and secondly, on the president’s watch, about 100,000 jobs were lost in the auto industry, in auto dealers and auto manufacturers.”

The claim that Romney helped create more than 100,000 jobs is difficult to prove. The campaign has said the figure comes from current statistics on three companies that Romney helped start or expand — Staples (89,000 jobs), Sports Authority (15,000 jobs) and Domino’s (7,900 jobs). However, the companies themselves, as opposed to Romney and Bain, may be responsible for the actual job creation since Bain’s initial investment. The figure also does not include companies — like GST Steel, which the Obama campaign and super PAC are highlighting — where jobs were lost.

Meanwhile, the auto industry has actually gained jobs under the Obama administration. In January 2009, 690,700 people were employed, a figure that dipped to 624,400 in June 2009, but then rose to 763,800 by April 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming who co-chaired President Barack Obama’s debt commission in 2010, took a swipe at one of his most fervent critics on Tuesday, saying that economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s work often “borders on hysteria.”

During an interview with Bloomberg TV, Simpson was asked what he thought of Krugman’s argument that more U.S. government spending would help lift the economy.

“Paul Krugman is a great economist, but he ain’t the best in the world,” Simpson said. “I love to read his stuff because it borders on hysteria. He talks about the lost souls of the past, and he is in there, too.”

Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, accused Simpson of “blood lust” in 2010 for his affinity for spending cuts.

Simpson also commented on debt commission reforms he proposed with co-chairman Erskine Bowles, a Democrat. The initial Simpson-Bowles plan, which proposed for bringing the top tax rate down by repealing a number of tax cuts and credits, was ignored by lawmakers. A bipartisan budget modeled after their report was also rejected by the House this year. Simpson said he remains optimistic about his recommendations.

“It’s like a stink bomb in a garden party, it ain’t going away,” Simpson, who is known for his colorful turns of phrase, said. “Buckle up your guts.”

Simpson also relayed some advice to lawmakers on how to sell his plan to the American public. According to Simpson, it is essential to push the idea of a “shared sacrifice” to get the country out of debt.

“Everybody will get hit,” he said. “If you tell people that and be honest with them, and let them bitch and roar and snort, you can make it through there.”

Look through more of Simpson’s history of colorful statements below:

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