Facebook the world’s No.1 online social networking site has raised about $16 billion making it one of the biggest initial public offerings or IPO in the American History. Rumors are rife with speculation about how much higher will the valuation goes up, once the actual trading begins. Facebook priced its offering at $38 per share on Thursday. But there is some amount of bullishness that is doing rounds as some expect that the price of the share would rise by about 30 percent or more on Friday.

Facebook is valued at $104 billion and is bigger than the combined valuation of Hewlett Packard and Starbuck Corp thereby raising higher expectations and speculation about its valuation when once the shares start trading under the FB Symbol at NASDAQ at around 11:00 AM Eastern Time. Facebook’s chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg is expected to ring the bell at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters today morning to official commence the trading session on the NASDAQ.

The European markets are expected to follow their Asian counterparts and financial analysts and speculators predicting that the main European Markets such as FTSE, GDAXI, and FCHI may open lower with 0.3 percent and the Europe Stock Futures up by 0.3 percent.

The Asia-Pacific shares of MSCI’s broadest index outside Japan MIAPJ0000PUS pushed back to as low as 1.1% which a four month low and then shedding some losses  to 0.4%. The worst performance came from commodities that dragged down the Australian shares AXJO. On the other hand, a sturdy yen and exporters with high exposure to Europe were responsible for Japan’s Nikkei average N255 tumbling down as much as 1.5%.

The U.S Bench mark S&P or Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes SPX fell below the key support line at 1,340 and bank shares took a severe beating because of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. suffering a trading loss which is estimated to reach $3 billion or more. The euro dashed to a four month low of $1.2814 and in the same way the Australian dollar hit a low of $0.9945.

Currencies that are usually regarded as a safe bet for their stability have stayed well in the form of U.S dollar and the yen, with the dollar index .DXY gaining an up momentum of a four month peak of 80.739.

Absence of Government in Greece

Even after 8 days of election, Greece is not able to form a government. Another bout of elections seems to be on horizon with a strong political opposition to international bail out and austerity measures. It is unlikely that anti-bail out leftists will win even if new elections are held. European leaders are quite firm on their posture that they will cut off the funding unless and until the Greece government fulfills its bailout commitments.

In a substantial bid to defend its current position, Google has been working on a number of fronts like launching a social networking platform, revamping its privacy policy, revamping its web persona and now the unparalleled and yet unrivalled search giant has acquired several patents from Motorola as a strategic move to strengthen the Android phone market. It is expected that new models of Motorola will now bear the Android version that will be seen as Google’s expansion into the mobile sphere that is currently dominated by smart phones from Apple, Blackberry, Samsung and the recently launched Lumia series from Nokia.

With an initial profile of a mere search engine, Google has delivered immense value to internet users through its thoughtful email platform and the recently launched social networking facet for its users, Google+. Although the latter hasn’t caught on, Google’s strategy is to enable the Android market by acquiring the mobile giant Motorola to extent the influence of its products over to the mobile users, which is being seen as a highly portent market especially in the Asian and South Asian markets where mobile use and presence has more than quadrupled in the last few years.

In a landmark agreement, five major US banks, State and Federal Governments made a deal for $25 billion over foreclosure abuses. The five banks namely Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc and Ally Financial Inc will now reduce loans for over 1 Million households and will also send $2,000 checks to about 750,000 households that were foreclosed improperly.

Such a huge deal involving one industry has not happened since the 1988 multi-state tobacco deal. Out of the 50 states, 49 of them agreed to the deal amicably except Oklahoma. They came to an agreement on their own.

The deal comes at a crucial time, when the President is seeking re-election and the deal could act in his favor. Especially, the settlement in the public eye appears to be strict action taken by the Government on banks that have rarely been questioned before. What the deal will also do is to try to put the housing sector back on its feet. At this moment it appears to be the biggest weak-link in the economy. The depreciation value of homes is about 33% from 2006 and many homeowners owe more money than their houses are worth.