Investors are bracing for Facebook’s Wall Street debut on Friday after the pioneering online social network raised about $16 billion in one of the biggest initial public offerings in U.S. history.

To rapturous applause from employees, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell to kick off trading on the Nasdaq market at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Zuckerberg rang the bell, with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Nasdaq Chief Executive Robert Greifeld on either side.

The 28-year-old founder hugged and high-fived Sandberg and other employees in celebration after he pressed the remote button.

The area outside the office was packed with throngs of photographers, more than 12 television trucks and a TV news helicopter hovering overhead as the excitement reached fever pitch.

With a value of $104 billion, Facebook is larger than Starbucks Corp and Hewlett-Packard combined.

“A 15 to 20 percent pop is in the realm of possibility,” said Tim Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Given they already moved their IPO range up and increased the size, that’s bullish to begin with.”

Facebook priced its offering at $38 a share on Thursday, but the price could be higher when shares begin trading under the FB symbol on the Nasdaq at 11 a.m. Eastern time (1500 GMT).

Throngs of cameramen gathered around the Nasdaq building in New York’s Time Square early on Friday morning as press throngs joined tourists and workers in the area.

One of the billboards in the area prominently carried the Facebook logo.

On Twitter and in office elevators the morning talk was betting how much Facebook’s initial price would rise by the end of trading.

Some expect shares could rise 30 percent or more on Friday, despite ongoing concerns about Facebook’s long-term money-making potential. An average of Morningstar analyst estimates put the closing price for Facebook shares on Friday at $50.

The IPO, expected to mint more than a thousand paper millionaires at the company, has received wall-to-wall media coverage and sparked hopes of a boom in sales of everything from San Francisco Bay area real estate to automobiles.

Facebook employees marked the event with an all-night “hackathon” at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.

The website, founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, has grown into the world’s dominant social network with 900 million users.

At $38 a share, Facebook would trade at more than 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc’s

Spain, under pressure from the European Union to accelerate its bank clean-up, will name independent auditors on Friday to probe bad loans and property holdings in the financial sector and determine how big a state bailout is needed.

The Spanish government has also hired Goldman Sachs to carry out an independent valuation of Bankia, the ailing bank taken over by the state last week, Spanish newspaper Expansion said. A spokeswoman for the economy ministry had no immediate comment.

Troubled banks, along with overspending in indebted regions, are the two biggest risks for Spain’s public finances. Investors believe Spain need to aggressively address these two issues to avoid an Irish-style bailout.

Credit rating agency Moody’s carried out a sweeping downgrade of 16 Spanish banks on Thursday, citing a weak economy and the government’s reduced ability to support troubled lenders.

All the banks’ long-term debt ratings were downgraded by at least one notch, and some suffered three-notch cuts.

Shares in Spanish banks fell at the market opening but were rising sharply by around 0930 GMT, with Bankia shooting up 9% while Santander and BBVA gained more than 3%.

Goldman Sachs will review Bankia’s and its parent company BFA’s books, the paper said, and will determine within a month how much the state should inject to refloat the lender, which had to be rescued after its auditor, Deloitte, identified several gaps in last year’s accounts.

Expansion said without citing sources that Bankia’s financial hole may reach 8 billion euros on top of the 10 billion it needs to set aside to cover potential losses on real estate assets, as required by two financial reforms passed by the government in February and last week.

MORE MONEY?

A restructuring plan for the bank will be presented next week by its new Chairman Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri, a senior government source said on Thursday.

The source said Bankia’s parent company BFA (Banco Financiero y de Ahorros) may need to provision additional capital to cover future losses on its real estate assets.

“For Bankia, the last estimate is enough, but BFA will need something on top of what it announced,” the source said.

Bankia said this week it would need 4.7 billion euro in capital to comply with the last banking reform, while BFA would only need 91 million.

Bankia’s share price slumped as much as 30% on Thursday, before the government denied a report that customers had withdrawn more than 1 billion euros from the partly nationalised lender.

According to banking sources, BlackRock and Oliver Wyman are likely to be chosen to audit the sector. They will first stress- test the sector as a whole, then look at each bank individually, the government source said.

The latter source said the exercise would enable the government to set a final figure for the money it will need to inject into the ailing banking sector.

The government estimated last week it would need less than 15 billion euros to recapitalise the banks.

“We’ll have a better idea in a month. If more capital is needed, we’ll look into it,” the source said.

Leaders of major industrial economies meet this weekend to try to head off a full-blown crisis in Europe where fears are growing that Greece could leave the euro zone bloc, threatening the future of the common currency.

President Barack Obama, the G8 host, has urged European leaders repeatedly to do more to stimulate growth, fearing contagion from the euro crisis that could hurt the US economy and his chances of re-election in November.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has been increasingly vocal in urging Europe to do more to resolve the debt woes, will tell leaders they must work together to stop the region’s economic crisis from spreading worldwide, an aide said.

No economic policy decisions are expected from the talks but officials said Obama hopes to promote a discussion on a comprehensive approach to resolving the crisis.

He will seek to cement a bond with France’s new leader at the White House later on Friday before heading to Camp David for the talks.

Francois Hollande, sworn in this week as French president, has already made waves by challenging Europe’s austerity focus and saying he will pull French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

Obama, 50, may use their introductory meeting in the Oval Office to encourage the 57-year-old Socialist to rethink his Afghanistan plans that put France on an earlier exit timetable than other NATO allies.

But the two leaders, who have both expressed support for pro-growth policies in Europe, are expected to form a common front on the euro zone crisis that could dominate this weekend’s Group of Eight talks.

Obama’s administration spent heavily to tackle the 2007-2009 US recession, and Hollande is seeking to take the edge off austerity with more job-creating infrastructure investments.

The G8 summit comes as Greeks are pulling cash from banks amid growing fears that it might crash out of the single currency euro zone, and financial markets have turned fearful about the prospects of a full-blown crisis in Europe.

Asian shares tumbled on Friday and were set for their worst weekly showing since September. Japan’s Nikkei average dropped 3 percent to log a seventh straight week of losses and its longest losing streak since 2001 and the euro hit a four-month low.

Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Hollande and Obama “see things very similarly about the need for a better balance between fiscal consolidation, austerity and economic growth.”

That could put pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has stressed the need for fiscal discipline to get the euro zone finances back on track even as voters have toppled belt-tightening governments.

One of Obama’s closest aides, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, said the United States welcomed the evolving debate in Europe about the “imperative for jobs and growth,” but he said the president’s intention was not to drive a wedge between Europe’s two biggest economies, Germany and France.

“I don’t think that the nature of these conversations are going to be anything like taking one side or the other,” he told reporters on Thursday.

“The president looks forward to leading a discussion among the leaders about the imperative of having a comprehensive approach to manage the crisis and get on a sustainable path towards recovery in Europe.”

India’s consumer price inflation accelerated in April to 10.36%, making life harder for the RBI as it looks to kickstart a flagging economy, government data showed on Friday.

In March, consumer prices rose 9.47%.

Consumer price-based food inflation accelerated to 10.18% in April from 8.22% in February, driven by a rise in prices of vegetables, eggs and fish products.

Inflation as measured by India’s benchmark wholesale price index accelerated to 7.23% in the year to April as price pressures for food, fuel and manufacturing items all picked up, data showed on Monday.

The Reserve Bank of India, which unlike other central banks uses mainly the wholesale price index for monitoring inflation, slashed policy rates by a steeper-than-expected 50 basis points last month to boost a sagging economy.

A sustained jump in inflation will make it harder for the bank to further reduce the cost of credit.

The annual consumer price index (CPI) was launched in February and measures retail prices in major food groups, fuel, clothing, housing and education across rural and urban India.

Another Federal Reserve policymaker o n Thursday called for the break-up of big banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co, saying that firm’s recent large trading loss underscores the difficulty of regulating such banks and the dangers they pose.

“This is why you want these companies to have plenty of capital,” St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said in response to questions after a speech to a Rotary Club. “I would back my colleague (Dallas Fed President) Richard Fisher in saying that we should split up the largest banks.”

Bullard’s comments echo those of Fisher, who advocates breaking up the five largest US financial institutions. Fisher said in the wake of revelations that JPMorgan had reported USD 2 billion in losses due to derivatives trades that he is worried that the biggest banks do not have adequate risk management.

Bullard told reporters that his call for breaking up big banks includes JPMorgan.

“We do not need these companies to be as big as they are,” he said. The regulatory system would be much simpler if large firms were broken up, rather than trying to write complicated rules to capture all of the potential risks at complex firms, he added.

“It would be simpler to have smaller institutions so that they could fail if they need to fail,” Bullard said.

The St. Louis Fed president said he supports the principle underlying the so-called Volcker rule, which is aimed at preventing commercial banks from making extensive risky trades on their own account.

“You shouldn’t be taking insured deposits and be unrestricted in your activities with those insured deposits,” he said.

Discussing his forecast for moderate economic growth, Bullard acknowledged U.S. economic data has been mixed recently, but said it does not point toaloss of momentum in the recovery, as occurred in 2010 and 2011. Jobless claims below the 400,000 level suggest a labor market that is continuing to improve, he said.

The Labor Department on Thursday reported 370,000 new jobless claims for the latest week, unchanged from the previous week.

The likely economic softness in Europe resulting from the sovereign debt turmoil is unlikely to seriously dent the US economic recovery unless it devolves into a full-blown financial crisis, which is unlikely, Bullard added.

“The direct trade effects are not large enough to really drag down US growth in a really significant way,” he said. “It’s a bit of a drag, but not a large drag.”

Fitch Ratings Agency on Thursday downgraded Greece’s credit rating to CCC from B-minus, citing the heightened risk that the country might have to leave the euro zone.

The failure by Greek politicians to form a government underscores a lack of public and political support for an austerity program, Fitch said in a statement explaining the cut to Greece’s long-term foreign and local currency issuer default ratings.

Should new elections fail to result in a mandate for a new government to continue austerity measures, a Greek exit from the monetary union would be “probable,” Fitch said.

“A Greek exit would likely result in widespread default on private sector as well as sovereign euro-denominated obligations, despite a moderate sovereign debt service burden following the restructuring of Greek government bonds in March,” the statement said.