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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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World powers share a “profound concern” that Syria is descending into civil war but have pledged to deploy 300 cease-fire monitors there by the end of the month, international envoy Kofi Annan said Tuesday. He warned, however, that the world can’t wait forever for the truce to work.

Annan said in Geneva that there has been “a spate of bombings that are really worrying” and that the U.N.’s cease-fire-monitoring mission “is the only remaining chance to stabilize the country.”

“There is a profound concern that the country could otherwise descend into full civil war, and the implications of that are frightening,” he said. “We cannot allow that to happen.”

Annan spoke to reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council by videoconference from Geneva, where he warned that failure to prevent a civil war “will not only affect Syria, it will have an impact on the whole region.”

Annan said he also told the Security Council that “unacceptable levels of violence and abuse” are continuing in Syria _ that government troops are still present in and around cities and towns and human rights violations are extensive and may be increasing.

“There have been worrying episodes of violence by the government, but we have also seen attacks against government forces, troops and installations. And there have been a spate of bombings that are really worrying and I’m sure creates incredible insecurity among the civilian population,” he said paydayloans.

He said there has been “some decrease in the military activities, but there are still serious violations in the cessation of violence that was agreed and the level of violence and abuses are unacceptable,” he said.

Annan warned that his six-point peace plan aimed at halting the fighting and initiating political talks to end the 14-month conflict is not an open-ended one. The Security Council has endorsed Annan’s plan and authorized 300 unarmed military observers to monitor actions by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime and opposition for three months.

The fighting between the two sides is estimated to have killed more than 9,000 people.

“We may well conclude down the line that it doesn’t work and a different tack has to be taken, and that will be a very sad day, and a tough day for the region,” he said.

Yet, he also tried to sound a note of optimism.

“We’ve been small in numbers, but even where we’ve been able to place two or three observers, they’ve had a calming effect,” he said. “And I think that when they are fully deployed and working as a team, establishing relations with the people, we will see much greater impact on the work that they are there to do.”

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Francois Hollande, who defeated French President Nicolas Sarkozy to become the first Socialist in 17 years to control Europe

WASHINGTON

Foreclosures increased through most of the St. Louis metro area during the first three months of the year, RealtyTrac reported Thursday.

The increases varied widely by county.  In St. Louis County, where 1,874 homes were threatened with foreclosure or already in bank’s hands, the number rose by 3 percent during January-to-March period, compared to the last three months of 2011.  But St. Charles County saw a 30 percent increase, bringing the number of foreclosed and threatened homes to 663.

The severity of the foreclosure situation also varies by area.  St. Louis city is faring the worse, with one out of 218 homes in foreclosure.  By contrast, only one in every 957 homes in Monroe county were in foreclosure.

Foreclosure hit one in 234 homes in St. Louis County, one in 213 in St. Charles County, one in 228 in Jefferson, 539 in Lincoln, 253 in Madison and 274 in St. Clair.

Nationally, RealtyTrac reported that foreclosures declined 2 percent in the first quarter, and were 16 percent below the same period in 2011 on line pay day loans.  Foreclosures were at their lowest since late 2007.

Analysts generally expect foreclosure filings to increase in the wake of February’s settlement between the government and major mortgage servicers over abusive foreclosure practices.

“The low foreclosure numbers in the first quarter are not an indication that the massive reservoir of distressed properties built up over the past few years has somehow miraculously evaporated,” said Brandon Moore, chief executive at RealtyTrac, an online market for foreclosed homes.  “The dam may not burst in the next 30 to 45 days, but it will burst.”

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The end appears near for LightSquared, one of the wireless industry’s grandest and riskiest gambles.

It’s odd to think of a company backed by $5 billion as a startup, but that’s what LightSquared is. It wanted to become the country’s fifth nationwide wireless carrier by going toe-to-toe with giants like Verizon and AT&T — an ambitious vision it had a real shot at pulling off.

Now, after a series of potentially fatal regulatory setbacks, it’s mulling bankruptcy. Philip Falcone, head of LightSquared’s majority owner Harbinger Capital Partners, told Reuters the company is "seriously considering" the option.

In a subsequent email to CNN, Falcone said: "I’ve said it is and always has been one of our options."

Chapter 11 wouldn’t necessarily spell the end, but it would move the goal posts much farther away. That’s a disaster for a company already backed up in its own end zone.

The unraveling began in February, when government regulators said they would bar the company from launching its network. LightSquared failed to convince the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that its network would not interfere with GPS signals.

CEO Sanjiv Ahuja stepped down two weeks later. In March, LightSquared’s biggest partner, Sprint Nextel (, Fortune 500), ended its $9 billion agreement with the company.

In a time when many big companies prefer sitting on their cash to making major capital investments, LightSquared swung for the fences. Building a nationwide wireless network from scratch is bogglingly expensive, but LightSquared is backed by a nearly $3 billion investment from Harbinger and more than $2 billion from other investors.

What made those investors believe their billions could pay off was that LightSquared is sitting on a truckload of valuable wireless spectrum.

LightSquared hoped to enter the wireless market as a wholesale provider of 4G service. That means it would provide the infrastructure and the network, but it would rely on its business partners to sell the service. Carriers aren’t exactly known to be good retailers, so the thinking was, "Why not let the experts handle that?"

The idea took off: The company signed 40 partners from a wide array of businesses, including retailers like Best Buy (, Fortune 500), device manufacturers like AirTouch and other carriers like Sprint and Leap Wireless ().

By partnering with LightSquared, Best Buy could have sold devices with Best Buy branded wireless service, Sprint could get much-needed capacity, and device makers could package service with their smartphones. Imagine one day being able to buy an iPhone with Apple’s (, Fortune 500) own wireless service.

LightSquared planned to severely undercut its competition. By selling only efficient 4G service — and not operating legacy 2G and 3G networks that are costly to maintain — LightSquared said it could offer its service starting at just $7 per gigabyte.

Verizon and AT&T offer data rates of around $15 per gigabyte. But smartphone customers are required to buy voice and data packages, which start at $75 for 450 minutes and 2 GB. Since few actually come close to reaching their limits, the average U flexcheck cash advance.S. smartphone customer pays about $56 for every gigabyte they use, LightSquared claims.

"You can triple or even quadruple our rate, and it’s still a dramatic savings over what consumer pays today," former CEO Ahuja told CNNMoney in late 2011. "We think the average price of wireless service should drop by 50% once we launch. The American consumer is simply paying too much."

LightSquared was attempting to fill a niche that no one else is playing in.

Verizon (, Fortune 500) and AT&T (, Fortune 500) are reluctant to sell their services wholesale, because spectrum is so scarce — and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to match LightSquared’s proposed prices.

There’s also Clearwire (), but Clearwire’s model is primarily to sell supplementary coverage in high-density areas to existing carriers. Other potential entrants, like cable giant Comcast (, Fortune 500), kicked the market’s tires and fled. The investment costs are simply too steep, Comcast executives have said.

Of course, when things sound too good to be true, they usually are.

LightSquared’s spectrum was originally licensed only for satellite services, not the much stronger terrestrial transmissions LightSquared wants to put there. Its entire business hinges on getting a waiver for its spectrum use.

That initially seemed likely. The Federal Communications Commission granted a temporary waiver, and powerful Washington backers supported LightSquared’s vision.

But concerns about signal interference with GPS devices plagued LightSquared, and in the end, regulators decided that it was too risky. They revoked the waiver.

Falcone says he remains determined to fight the good fight. But if LightSquared doesn’t get regulatory green lights by the end of the year, the company will run out of money and will be forced to sell off its assets, according to Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at Credit Suisse.

That’s because LightSquared has relatively fixed costs — with or without customers.

The company predicts its network and infrastructure will cost $30 billion to operate and maintain over the course of the next five years. It will cost LightSquared $30 billion to operate a network with zero customers and $30 billion to run a network with 25 million customers.

With customers, Chaplin thinks the venture could have been profitable just a few years after launching. But Chaplin now thinks that other potential customers will follow Sprint’s lead and dissolve their deals.

"The great shame about LightSquared is that it could have stirred up the industry, and it could have benefited consumers tremendously," Chaplin said. "But with no spectrum, there’s just the fixed cost of running a network."

Hence the bankruptcy chatter. That’s the risk of giant gambles: Sometimes you roll snake eyes.

But if LightSquared collapses, it will take with it the wireless industry’s best shot at launching an entire wave of new rivals to the strengthening AT&T/Verizon duopoly.

-CNN’s Felicia Taylor contributed to this story 

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More bad news for Chinese telecom giant Huawei this week is raising questions about the company’s ability to do business with the West.

Huawei, which is second only to Sweden’s Ericsson in telecom equipment sales, was blocked on Monday from bidding on a $36 billion Australian national broadband contract.

The Australian government is working to connect virtually the entire country to a high-speed fiber-optic broadband network, and Huawei wanted to supply the project with much of the necessary infrastructure equipment. The government-run National Broadband Network Co. wanted to consider Huawei, but the Australian Security Intelligence Organization recommended that the Chinese company not be allowed to bid for security reasons, Australia’s Financial Review reported.

Getting barred from foreign contracts is becoming a frequent problem for the Shenzhen, China-based company.

Also this week, the New York Times reported that a cybersecurity joint venture between Huawei and security firm Symantec (, Fortune 500) ended in November because of Symantec’s concerns that its relationship with Huawei would prevent it from getting a sensitive U.S. government security contract. Symantec did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a spokesman for Huawei denied the Times’ account.

The setbacks for Huawei are just more links in a long chain of defeats in Western countries — particularly in the United States.

U.S. lawmakers and regulators have blocked Huawei from three proposed acquisitions and many more partnerships over the past decade, including a bid for 3Com and a supply deal with Sprint, both of which contract with the U.S. military. 3Com was eventually purchased by Hewlett-Packard (, Fortune 500).

Huawei has no problems getting contracts in many places around the globe. The company does business in 140 countries and serves 500 operators, including 45 of the 50 largest global telecom companies.

But it can’t count Verizon (, Fortune 500), AT&T (, Fortune 500), Sprint (, Fortune 500) or T-Mobile USA among its customers. Or the American government pay day loans.

Huawei faces three key obstacles, all of them geo-political in nature.

First, Huawei’s CEO is Ren Zhengfei, once a civil engineer for the People’s Liberation Army. The most advanced, persistent cyberattacks emanate from China, and the U.S. government believes many are sponsored by the Chinese government. Those attacks have captured intellectual property from U.S.-based corporations and secrets from the U.S. military.

Second, Huawei — like all companies based in the Communist country — has ties with the Chinese government.

Finally, the company has historically been willing to supply Iran with networking equipment, which Iran reportedly used to track its citizens. Huawei has since said it would scale back its relationship with Iran.

Huawei says it is being unfairly treated and mischaracterized.

"Huawei recognizes that there are geopolitial tensions; however, Huawei is a private company owned by its employees, financed by major commercial banks," said Bill Plummer, a spokesman for the company. "We would encourage anyone who wants to learn about the company to engage in facts."

Over the past year, Huawei has become increasingly vocal about what it sees as misinformation spread about the company. Most notably, Huawei released an open letter last February detailing its relationships with governments both in China and around the world.

The company constantly points to the many countries that it does do business in, including the United Kingdom, as examples of its integrity and focus on security.

There’s a big incentive to keep haggling, pushing and persuading. The United States is a $30 billion telecom market — and growing. As mobile traffic soars and 4G networks roll out, there’s a huge need for infrastructure spending.

But with Australia’s big "N-O" to Huawei and recent revelations about why Symantec was so eager to dump it as a partner, it’s clear Huawei still has a lot of convincing to do. 

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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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Leung Chun-ying, a former property surveyor, pledged to address Hong Kong

Attacks against al-Qaida’s favorite targets in Iraq killed 14 people Monday as insurgents struck security forces, a government office and jewelry stores, demonstrating a continued threat from armed groups as the country prepares to host a meeting of the Arab world’s top leaders.

Security officials expect al-Qaida to ramp up violence over the next few weeks as Baghdad prepares to host the annual Arab League summit at the end of the month.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Monday’s strikes, and numerous armed groups in Iraq have mixed attacks on political targets with money-making criminal operations. But al-Qaida in Iraq for years has been believed to fund itself in part with cash and gold stolen from jewelry stores.

Militants struck first in a pre-dawn raid Monday in the city of Tarmiyah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Baghdad, where police said gunmen in at least two cars attacked the local mayor’s office. Three policemen were killed, police and health officials said. The mayor was not in his office at the time.

A half hour later and a few miles (kilometers) away, gunmen targeted a police patrol in a drive-by shooting. Two policemen were killed, officials said, and it was not known if the gunmen were the same group who attacked the mayor’s office.

A few hours later, two carloads of robbers armed with grenades and guns killed nine people and wounded 14 in a coordinated strike on an eastern Baghdad gold market, officials said. The militants simultaneously attacked jewelry stores and a nearby checkpoint.

Baghdad officials said two policemen, two soldiers and two goldsmiths were among the dead at the small market in the Shiite neighborhood of Ur.

“At first we heard shootings from the other side of the market, near the police checkpoint,” said eyewitness Maitham Moussa, 30, who owns of a dairy shop about 50 yards (meters) from the jewelry stores payday advance low fees. “Then we heard shootings very close to us. When the women started to yell, they started to open fire into the air and set off sound bombs.”

He said people fled the area and huddled together in a nearby alley to escape the siege. “I saw a woman was lying on the ground with a toddler,” Moussa said. “There was blood near the woman, but I’m not sure if she was injured or if was the baby’s blood.”

A police officer said the gunmen stole gold and cash after the late-morning heist, which the insurgents pulled off despite a gunfight with nearby security forces. Iraqi Army Gen. Hassan al-Baydhani of Baghdad’s military command said one of the gunmen was arrested but the rest escaped.

A doctor in a nearby Baghdad hospital confirmed the police casualty figures. They all spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information. Al-Baydhani put the number of dead at six. Conflicting casualty totals are common in the immediate aftermath of attacks in Iraq.

Although violence has dropped significantly since the sectarian fighting that brought Iraq to the edge of civil war just five years ago, deadly attacks still happen almost every day.

U.S. officials as recently as September said jewelry robberies were a main source of funding for al-Qaida in Iraq as it grapples with dwindling financial support. The Sunni militant movement also frequently targets officials of the Shiite-led government in a campaign to undermine confidence in its authority.

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