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Britain requires further monetary easing to aid the economy and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne should prepare for temporary tax cuts, the International Monetary Fund said.

With the economy mired in its first double-dip recession since the 1970s, the Bank of England and the Treasury should introduce policies to underpin demand and unclog the financial system, the Washington-based lender said in its annual review of the U.K. published today. The central bank needs to inject further stimulus through bond purchases or by cutting interest rates, with tax cuts following as soon as the fall, it said.

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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the government will focus more on bolstering economic growth, indicating policies may be loosened further as inflation moderates.

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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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WASHINGTON • U.S. builders began work on more homes last month, evidence that the battered housing market is slowly healing.

The Commerce Department said today that builders broke ground at a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 717,000 homes in April from March. That’s 2.6 percent more than March’s total, which was revised higher. Construction rose for both single-family homes and apartments.

Building permits, a gauge of future construction, fell last month from a 3 ½ year high to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 715,000. But that was because of a 23 percent drop in the volatile apartment category. Permits for single-family homes rose almost 2 percent.

Even with the gains, the rate of construction and the level of permits requested remain roughly half the pace considered healthy. But the increase, along with rising builder confidence and stronger job growth, is a hopeful sign that the home market may finally be starting to recover nearly five years after the housing bubble burst.

Builders have grown more confident since last fall, in part because more people have expressed interest in buying a home. In May, builder optimism rose to the highest level in five years, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo builder sentiment index.

Homebuilders reported improving sales and higher traffic from prospective buyers, the survey showed. A gauge measuring confidence in sales over the next six months also rose to 34 from 31 guaranteed high risk personal loans.

Recent job gains have likely made it easier for more Americans to purchase a home. Employers have added 1 million jobs in the past five months. And unemployment has dropped a full percentage point since August, from 9.1 percent to 8.1 percent in April.

Mortgage rates, meanwhile, have fallen to record lows, making home-buying more affordable. Still, many would-be buyers are having difficulty qualifying for home loans or can’t afford larger down payments required by banks.

Though new homes represent just 20 percent of the overall home market, they have an outsize impact on the economy. Each home built creates an average of three jobs for a year and generates about $90,000 in taxes, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

There are some hurdles to a smooth recovery: Builders are struggling to compete with deeply discounted foreclosures and short sales — when lenders allow homes to be sold for less than what’s owed on the mortgage.

Another reason sales have fallen is that previously occupied homes have become a better deal than new homes. The median price of a new home is about 30 percent higher than the median price for a re-sale. That’s nearly twice the markup typical in a healthy housing market.

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Avon shares are plunging in premarket trading after Coty dropped its $10.7 billion takeover bid for the cosmetics company.

Coty Inc., a privately held rival, had raised its original offer last week by about 6.5 percent, but set a deadline of Monday for the New York company to accept the bid.

Avon asked for more time to consider the bid over the weekend, but it appears that Coty is having none of it. It slammed that door shut on the troubled company Monday and investors are following suite even before the markets open Tuesday in some heavy trading.

If the current prices hold, Avon shares will be worth less than when Coty made its original offer back in April.

Shares are down 14 percent to $18 in premarket trading.

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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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Shares of Tilly’s Inc. rose Friday above their offered price in the clothing retailer’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Irvine, Calif.-based company’s stock jumped $2.30, or 14.8 percent, to $17.80 in morning trading after opening at $18.80 and briefly rising as high as $19.29 per share.

The company had priced its initial public offering of 8 million shares at $15.50 per share. It is offering 7.6 million shares and selling stockholders are offering 400,000 shares.

Tilly’s sells surf-inspired and casual West Coast-styled clothing and accessories at its chain of 140 stores in 19 states. It was founded by Hezy Shaked and Tilly Levine, who opened their first store in Orange County, Calif., in 1982 and are still principal shareholders.

Tilly’s expects to receive net proceeds of about $107.6 million after expenses. It won’t receive any proceeds from the sales by the selling stockholders cheap credit report.

Tilly’s is a holding company and does its business through Tilly’s World of Jeans & Tops. It plans to use proceeds from the IPO to pay shareholders with a stake in Tilly’s World Jeans & Tops, which will be made into a wholly owned subsidiary of Tilly’s.

In the fiscal year ending Jan. 28, the company earned $34.3 million. That was up 41 percent from the prior year. Its revenue rose 20 percent to $400.6 million for the year.

The underwriters of the IPO included Goldman, Sachs, BofA Merrill Lynch, and Piper Jaffray. Underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to an extra 1.2 million shares to cover overallotments.

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A disgruntled Yahoo shareholder questioned the qualifications and integrity of recently hired CEO Scott Thompson after exposing a misrepresentation about the executive’s education.

The fabrication confirmed Thursday by Yahoo Inc. gives New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb more artillery as he tries to topple a board of directors favored by Thompson, who became CEO of the troubled Internet company four months ago.

Loeb, whose fund Third Point owns a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, gained more leverage when he discovered Thompson doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree in computer science from a small college in Easton, Mass., as Yahoo stated in a regulatory filing last week.

Thompson only has an accounting degree from Stonehill College, an accomplishment that Yahoo also listed in the filing. The accounting degree was the only one listed in Thompson’s resume last year by eBay Inc. when he was still running that company’s PayPal payment service. He graduated in 1979, according to Stonehill’s website.

Yahoo confirmed Thompson’s credentials had been exaggerated in the recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., brushed off the distortion as an “inadvertent error.”

But Loeb pounced on the misinformation as a violation of Yahoo’s code of ethics and called for an independent investigation to determine whether Thompson had misled the company’s board about his technology credentials. He also cited the mix-up as an example of Yahoo’s poor corporate governance.

“If Mr. Thompson embellished his academic credentials we think that it 1) undermines his credibility as a technology expert and 2) reflects poorly on the character of the CEO who has been tasked with leading Yahoo at this critical juncture,” Loeb wrote in a letter to Yahoo’s board on Thursday. “Now more than ever Yahoo investors need a trustworthy CEO.”

In the past, other companies have suspended or fired executives who were caught lying on their resumes.

Yahoo hired Thompson to reverse years of financial lethargy that set in at the company even as more advertising shifted to the Internet. The funk has weighed on Yahoo’s stock, which has been hovering between $10 and $20 for most of the last three years. Yahoo shares fell 27 cents to close at $15.40 on Thursday. That’s well below the $33 per share that stockholders could have gotten in May 2008 if the board had accepted a takeover offer from Microsoft Corp.

The company stood behind Thompson in its statement payday loan. “This in no way alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies,” Yahoo said. “Under Mr. Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo is moving forward to grow the company and drive shareholder value.”

Tensions between Loeb and Thompson escalated since late March when Yahoo appointed three new directors to its board. In doing so, Yahoo snubbed Loeb, who had been lobbying for a board seat along with three allies who he believes have the skills necessary to help Yahoo rebound from its long-running struggles. At the time, Thompson made it clear that he and the Yahoo committee overseeing the search for new directors had concluded Loeb wasn’t the best candidate.

Loeb is waging a campaign to persuade Yahoo’s shareholders to elect him and his allies to the board at the company’s annual meeting. The date of that meeting still hasn’t been set.

Besides ripping Thompson, Loeb also sought to discredit Patti Hart, one of the Yahoo directors he wants bounced from the board. Hart led the committee that recommended Yahoo’s new appointments to the board.

In his letter, Loeb noted that Yahoo’s recent SEC filing says Hart holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University. In its response, Yahoo clarified Hart received a bachelor’s degree in business administration with specialties in marketing and economics.

Thompson, 54, has mostly cut costs to boost profits since taking over as Yahoo’s CEO. Last month, he laid off about 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in Yahoo’s 17-year history. He also disclosed plans to close about 50 Yahoo services that haven’t been attracting enough users or generating enough revenue.

He has made modest progress on other financial fronts. Yahoo registered its first year-over-year increase in quarterly net revenue since 2008 during the three months ending in March.

Even though he doesn’t have a computer science degree, Thompson has a background in technology. He served as PayPal’s chief technology officer for three years before being promoted to the payment service’s president in 2008. He also previously worked as chief technology officer at credit- and debit-card processor Visa USA.

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U.S. investors were set to hold steady at Tuesday’s open, awaiting new reports on manufacturing, auto sales and corporate results for clues about the strength of the U.S. economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average (), S&P 500 () and Nasdaq () futures were all little changed. Stock futures indicate the possible direction of the markets when they open at 9:30 a.m. ET.

On tap for Tuesday are new readings on manufacturing, construction spending and auto sales. Investors will be searching for signs to assuage concerns that the recovery in the U.S. economy may be stalling.

The latest round of corporate results include reports from BP () and Pfizer (, Fortune 500).

U.S. stocks finished in the red Monday, ending a mostly sour month on a weak note. Following three months of solid gains, all three major U.S. indexes posted their worst monthly returns of the year in April.

Resurfacing concerns about Europe and a possible hard landing in China have helped put a brake on the momentum from earlier this year.

A report on manufacturing in China rose slightly, which could help allay concerns about the economy slowing too quickly.

Meanwhile, Australia’s central bank announced it was cutting its key interest rate by 0.5 percentage point to 3.75%, due to below trend growth both in Australia and globally. It was the bank’s biggest rate cut since February 2009, when global financial markets were still in near free fall.

On Monday, Spain’s government said its economy declined for the second straight quarter, revealing that the nation is in recession. The report came with Spanish bond yields still at perilously high levels, and just days after Standard and Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating.

World markets: Britain’s FTSE 100 () edged higher 0.4% in midday trading. Markets in Paris and Frankfurt were closed for the May Day holiday.

Japan’s Nikkei () ended down 1.8%, while markets in Hong Kong and Shanghai were closed for the holiday.

Economy: The April installment of the Institute for Supply Management manufacturing Index is expected to come in at 53, down from 53.4 in March, according to a survey of analysts by Briefing.com. Any reading above 50 still indicates growth in the sector that has helped to lead the U.S. economic recovery.

NYSE operator hit by trading slump

April U.S. auto sales are forecast to be up to a seasonally-adjusted annual sales pace of about 14.3 million vehicles. That would be a rise from the year-ago rate of 13.4 million, but down from March sales’ pace of 14.7 million.

U.S. automakers General Motors (, Fortune 500) and Ford Motor (, Fortune 500) are both forecast to report lower sales.

March construction spending is expected to have risen by 0.5%, according to economists’ estimates.

Companies: Oil company BP posted a drop in quarterly earnings to $1.52 a share from $1.76 a year earlier, missing estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. BP joined Exxon Mobil (, Fortune 500) and ConocoPhillips (, Fortune 500) as major oil companies to miss forecasts for the first quarter. Shares of BP lost 2.8% in premarket trading.

Drugmaker Pfizer (, Fortune 500), a Dow component, reported earnings of 58 cents a share for the first quarter, down from 60 cents a share a year earlier but 2 cents better than forecasts. Shares of Pfizer slipped 0.7% in premarket trading.

Delta Air Lines (, Fortune 500) announced plans Monday to purchase an oil refinery outside of Philadelphia, a novel approach to reducing its fuel costs. Shares gained 1.7% in premarket trading.

4 ways to cash in on $100 oil

Currencies and commodities: The dollar lost ground slightly against the euro, but gained on the British pound and Japanese yen.

Oil for June delivery lost 30 cents to $104.57 a barrel.

Gold futures for June delivery fell $1.50 to $1,662.50 an ounce.

Bonds: The price on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury edged higher, but the yield was little changed at 1.91%.  

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Biotech firm Human Genome Sciences announced Thursday that it had rejected a takeover bid from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline that valued it at just over 80% of its closing price Wednesday.

HGS () said the offer — at $13 per share, or $2.6 billion — "does not reflect the value inherent" in the company. It added, however, that it was reviewing "strategic alternatives" including the possible sale of the company, and that Glaxo () had been invited to participate in the process.

HGS shares jumped on the news, opening at $14.21, nearly double Wednesday’s closing price of $7.17.

Glaxo CEO Andrew Witty said in a statement that his firm was "disappointed that Human Genome Sciences has rejected our offer without discussion and are confident that our offer is in the best interest of shareholders of both companies."

Hostile takeovers are back

The two firms, Witty noted, have collaborated for nearly 20 years, including on the lupus drug Benlysta, a joint venture.

HGS shares traded around $30 just a year ago, but have dropped sharply since then as the company has reported heavy losses. In February, HGS reported a net loss for 2011 of $381 million.

The announcement comes a day after Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche () announced that it was abandoning its bid for U.S. biotech firm Illumina ().

HGS has attracted controversy in the past with its attempts to patent genetic sequences, which have raised questions about whether such information can be subject to intellectual property laws. 

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