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There are plenty of reasons to "like" Facebook, but Internet IPOs are better known for their epic flops than wild successes.

Of the 31 Internet IPOs held since the beginning of 2011, 22 are currently trading below their closing price on the day they went public. Here’s an even scarier stat: 16 are trading below their offer price.

After popping by a collective 34% on IPO day, those 31 stocks are now trading at an average of just 8% above their offer prices. Excluding LinkedIn () and Zillow (), which are trading at more than double their offering prices, the rest of the Internet IPO list is collectively up by just 2%.

Generalizing across more than two dozen Internet companies is tricky, because they all have different business models, but the trend has been quite consistent: Internet IPOs get a nice bounce on day one of public trading, then slide off in subsequent days and weeks.

That’s the environment in which Facebook () is offering its shares to the public. The social network will sell about a fifth of its shares on Thursday. Those early buyers can begin reselling their shares on the Nasdaq exchange on Friday.

"It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen with Facebook, but from what we’re hearing on the demand side of things, I wouldn’t expect Facebook to do anything out of the ordinary in terms of beating this trend," says Nathan Drona, analyst at ABR Investment Strategy. "There will be an initial bump, but then the time to exit is at the strength of that rise."

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 and Drona expects shares to surge as high as $50 before eventually falling back to a range of $31 to $33.

Related story: 10 big dot.com flops

The bump-and-slide trend is caused by investors’ initial enthusiasm during IPOs — which eventually gets replaced by an examination of the companies’ business fundamentals.

Wall Street analysts remain concerned about Facebook’s slowing growth, weak ad sales-per-user numbers and lack of monetization of its mobile products.

Stephan Paternot, founder of 1990’s dot-com poster child theGlobe.com, knows a little about what Facebook is getting itself into.

TheGlobe Business Card Holders.com was a pioneering Internet community, and its November 1998 IPO generated an investor frenzy. On its first day of trading, the stock had one of the biggest IPO surges in history, soaring by 606%.

The never-profitable company never again traded as high, and was out of business within five years.

"Unfortunately, our run-up on IPO day meant we left $200 million to $300 million on table and raised only $30 million," Paternot told CNNMoney this week. That’s a problem underwriters are supposed to guard against: Because companies get cash only for the shares they sell directly, they don’t profit when IPO buyers resell their shares for huge gains.

"The positive side was it created a branding event — by the end of the day, everyone had heard of theGlobe," Paternot recalls. "But when every institutional investor flipped it the next day, the stock went down, and everyone thought there was something wrong with us."

The current Internet IPO trend is starting to echo the 1990’s dot-com bubble.

The most famous example from go-go days is VA Linux, a PC company whose shares jumped 698% in its first day of trading — still a U.S. record, according to Dealogic. That stock also never traded higher than on its IPO day, falling from $239 all the way down to $8.47 a year later.

Though their fall hasn’t been nearly as epic, two of last year’s super-hyped IPOs — Groupon () and LinkedIn — have also never yet returned to the highs they reached on their IPO days.

The companies received bullish headlines when their IPOs popped: Groupon rose 31% and LinkedIn shot up 109% on their first days of trading. But the sentiment turned sour once their shares started slipping.

Though he believes Facebook’s long-term potential is strong, in the near-term, Paternot thinks the bump-and-slide serves as a harbinger of things to come for Facebook.

"Facebook is as over-hyped and inflated as a company going public can be," he says. "All that company can do is slide down in the next six to nine months." 

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Avon says it’s considering a sweetened buyout offer of almost $10.7 billion from Coty Inc.

Avon says that it expects to respond to the new offer within a week. The offer was made in a letter on May 9.

Coty sweetened its 2-month-old offer by about 6.5 percent to $24.75 per share and demanded a response from Avon by Monday.

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Coty’s financing sources include Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., German holding company Joh. A. Benckiser GmbH, which controls Coty, and BOT Capital Partners.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner warned Congress against repeating last year

Global stocks were buoyant Tuesday while the euro struck a near one-month high against the dollar after Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke indicated that U.S. monetary policy will remain loose for some time to come to spur the economy.

On Monday, Bernanke said the U.S. job market was still weak despite recent signs of improvement. Investors interpreted his comments as a clear suggestion that the Fed will continue to prop up the economy by keeping short-term interest rates near zero. Some even speculated it could mean the Fed would be willing to buy up more bonds.

The Fed has so far embarked on two rounds of bond-buying, most recently in late 2010, known as quantitative easing. The idea is to drive down long-term interest rates and encourage investors to buy stocks. The second round ignited a 28 percent Wall Street rally over eight months.

The mere thought that a third round of bond-buying, dubbed QE3 by industry insiders, might be possible triggered a turnaround in markets, which last week had been shaken by signs of economic slowdown in China and Europe.

“Once again we are through the looking glass, in a world where stocks rise on hopes that U.S. economic data will weaken, since this then raises the probability that the Fed will launch QE3,” said Ben Critchley, a sales trader at IG Index.

“We remain stuck in a world where markets seem unable to cope without the possibility of monetary stimulus, underscoring the fact that the global economy still has some way to go before it is successfully weaned off active central bank intervention,” he said.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was up 0.3 percent to 5,392 while Germany’s DAX rose 0.7 percent to 7,130. The CAC-40 in France was 0.6 percent higher at 3,524.

Wall Street was also poised for a solid opening after Monday’s stellar gains, which saw the Standard & Poor’s 500 index close at 1,416.51, its best finish since May 2008 _ both Dow futures and the S&P futures indicated a 0.2 percent advance at the open.

In the currency markets, the euro continued to find support as investors became more comfortable with riskier trades. Conversely, Bernanke’s hint that rates will remain low hurt the dollar _ lower rates tend to weigh on a currency by reducing the returns investors get from holding it.

The euro was up 0.2 percent at $1.3374, its highest level for nearly a month.

Bernanke’s comments also helped support prices for commodities since they are traded in dollars _ when the U.S. currency drops, commodities become more attractive to investors holding other currencies, such as the euro.

The benchmark New York oil price was up 18 cents at $107.21 a barrel, near nine-month highs.

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LONDON/BEIJING

Federal trade officials today announced a decision to impose modest tariffs on solar panels from China after concluding that the government there unfairly subsidized manufacturers.

But the duties, ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent, are less than some analysts and industry officials had anticipated, raising questions as to how much U.S. manufacturers will benefit.

Tuesday’s decision stems from a complaint by the Oregon-based subsidiary of Germany’s SolarWorld AG and six other manufacturers accusing Chinese rivals of dumping crystalline silicon solar cells and panels in the United States at artificially low prices and receiving billions of dollars in Chinese government subsidies.

The resulting investigation is among several pending trade cases that have escalated tensions between the economic superpowers in recent months. It has also fractured the U.S. solar industry during a period of record growth.

SolarWorld sought tariffs to offset the flood of low-cost Chinese solar panels that now make up about half of the U.S. market, up from 8 percent in 2008.

Sales of Chinese-made solar panels in the U.S. has quadrupled over the past two years to $3.1 billion in 2011, according to the Commerce Department.

Meanwhile, prices in the United States fell by 50 percent, leading at least a dozen American manufacturers to close plants, lay off workers or go bankrupt, SolarWorld said.

But solar developers and installers have benefited the rapid decline that contributed to a record 1,855 megawatts of solar-power generating capacity going on line last year, according to GTM Research.

Solar developers including California-based SunEdison — a unit of O’Fallon, Mo.-based MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. — say tariffs on Chinese imports would raise prices for consumers and be a net job killer.

The majority of the U.S. solar industry’s 100,000 jobs are installers, distributors and electricians who work for small firms “downstream” of the manufacturing process, and those jobs would be in jeopardy if solar prices rise, they say.

Jigar Shah, president of the coalition, whose members include MEMC, called Tuesday’s decision is “relatively positive” and said it wouldn’t “significantly raise solar prices in the United States.”

“This decision clearly demonstrates that the Commerce Department did not find the Chinese government engaged in massive subsidization,” Shah said.

But SolarWorld and other manufacturers who brought the case said it affirms what they alleged — that Chinese manufacturers benefited from unfair government assistance.

The coalition of solar manufacturers that filed the complaint said the duties announced Tuesday are consistent with the government’s findings in other countervailing duties cases involving China.

Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America Inc., said Tuesday’s decision is “the first step in a process that will roll out over the next several months.”

The companies that filed the complaint didn’t ask for a specific level of countervailing duties. But they did seek anti-dumping duties of 100 percent or more. And that part of the case is yet to be decided.

The Commerce Department is continuing its look into allegations that China sold panels in U.S. at below-market prices. A separate set of anti-dumping tariffs could be imposed based on the results. A preliminary decision is expected on May 17.

“If we address unfair trade practices in the U.S. solar market, we can get back to our business of expanding American manufacturing and jobs in the renewable energy sector,” Carlo Santoro, an executive at New Jersey-based MX Solar USA, said in a statement. “We look forward to getting back to the fair and legal competition that serves everyone best.”

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China is clamping down on overcapacity in the world

British and Hong Kong leaders said Monday they will team up to develop London into an international trading center for China’s currency.

British Treasury chief George Osborne said in Hong Kong that his trip to Asia this week, which also includes stops in Beijing and Tokyo, furthers dialogue with Chinese authorities and Chinese and British banks “on establishing London as a new hub for the renminbi market as a complement to Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong’s leader, Chief Executive Donald Tsang said a new private sector-led group will be set up to look at strengthening ties between Hong Kong and London in terms of settlement systems, market liquidity and the development of renminbi financial products.

Beijing is promoting the international use of the renminbi, also known as the yuan. It’s also promoting Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory with its own financial system and currency, as an offshore trading center for the yuan.

Last year, yuan-denominated bank deposits in Hong Kong doubled to 630 billion renminbi ($100 billion) as savers sought higher returns from the yuan, which has been strengthening 4-5 percent a year.

Beijing would like to see the currency become an alternative to the dollar, although tight capital controls limit its circulation overseas.

“It’s clear that there’s scope for substantial expansion of the renminbi market in coming years,” said Osborne, who was speaking at a financial conference.

He said that in June 2011, China’s share of world trade was 11 percent but the yuan’s share of global foreign exchange trading last year was only 0.9 percent.

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