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Facebook’s long-awaited IPO filing is imminent, according to several news reports.

The Wall Street Journal kicked off the hoopla on Friday, citing anonymous sources who said that Facebook may file for an initial public offering as early as this Wednesday.

The New York Times and CNBC echoed that with their own unnamed sources in articles posted late Tuesday, saying that the filing will land Wednesday. Facebook is seeking to raise up to $5 billion in its offering, they added.

If that number is correct, Facebook would represent by far the largest global IPO ever by an Internet-focused company, according to data from Dealogic. Google’s (, Fortune 500) $1.9 billion debut is currently the largest U.S. Internet IPO.

But Facebook would still lag behind blockbuster U.S. IPOs like those from Visa (, Fortune 500), which raised more than $19 billion in 2008, and General Motors (, Fortune 500), which raised $18 billion last year.

Facebook’s IPO filing won’t answer one burning question: What’s the company worth? For that, Wall Street will have to wait until Facebook starts trading, which typically happens several months after companies file their first round of regulatory paperwork.

Some experts have suggested that the social network could valued between $75 billion and $100 billion once it starts trading. No matter what the market cap, Facebook’s IPO is undeniably hot, says Max Wolff, chief economist at GreenCrest Capital.

But there’s a lot more riding on Facebook’s paperwork than wealth creation. The social network has become an entire ecosystem, supporting independent app makers and gaming platforms like Zynga ().

Facebook’s filing will have implications for companies that depend on it, as well as the social media landscape at large. Until then, analysts are left to speculate about Facebook’s revenue streams and profitability — and whether it really deserves a $100 billion market value.

Michael Pachter, a research analyst at Wedbush Securities, says the rumored valuation range is reasonable — though he won’t cite a specific estimate of his own.

How Facebook makes money — and could make more: The vast majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising: a combination of search and display ads. And the sales growth is incredibly robust.

Research firm eMarketer estimated last September that Facebook’s ad revenue would more than double in 2011 to $3.8 billion and increase another 52% to $5.78 billion in 2012.

Facebook has grown by grabbing market share from Google and Yahoo. Last year Facebook comprised 16.3% of the so-called display (i.e. banners and other graphical ads) market, eMarketer estimates — compared with Yahoo’s (, Fortune 500) 13.1% and Google’s (, Fortune 500) 9.3%.

Martin Pyykkonen, analyst at Wedge Partners, says Facebook is highly appealing to advertisers because about two-thirds of its users fall into the coveted age demographic of 18-49. He thinks Facebook’s ad targeting will become even more effective over time.

"The ‘Like’ button option is a basic example of targeting," Pyykkonen wrote in a note to clients Monday. "[It’s] likely that advertisers will be able to even better target their audiences as Facebook goes deeper with integrating apps, games, movies, music."

Facebook’s other revenue stream is its payment system for purchases within apps and games: Facebook Credits. Facebook keeps 30% of the revenue from those payments, and passes the remaining 70% on to the app developer.

Facebook Credits now comprises 10% of the company’s total revenue, up from 5% in early 2010, Pyykkonen estimates.

Those estimates will soon be backed up — or refuted — by hard numbers from Facebook. Once its IPO filing does finally land, it will help answer questions about the overall social media market.

"People are extrapolating outcomes into an environment that’s hungry for missing details," said Wolff. "It’s like all the guys in the class spreading rumors about the prettiest girl in the school."

– CNNMoney’s Maureen Farrell contributed reporting. 

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Manufacturing in the New York region expanded in January at the fastest pace in nine months, reflecting improving orders, sales and employment.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York

President Barack Obama will speak today at the White House at 11:20 a.m. Washington time on steps he plans to make the U.S. government leaner, smarter and more consumer-friendly, a White House official said business card templates.

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In a story Jan. 4 about The Boeing Co.’s announcement that it is closing its plant in Wichita, Kan., The Associated Press reported erroneously that the closure will cost 2,160 workers their jobs. An unspecified number of those workers will be allowed to transfer to the company’s plants in other states cheap pay day loans.

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A steady decline in the number of people applying for weekly unemployment benefits is the latest signal that the economy has strengthened and businesses may be poised to step up hiring.

Applications fell last week fell to a seasonally adjusted 381,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the lowest level since late February.

And a four-week average for applications, which smooths week-to-week fluctuations, fell for the ninth time in 11 weeks to an eight-month low.

The downward trend in unemployment benefit applications bolsters the view that the economy has improved from its spring slump, when many feared another recession was likely. Consumer confidence is up, retailers reported a strong start to the holiday shopping season and the unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest point in two and a half years.

“There have been numerous indications that the labor market is healing and today’s jobless claims report only reinforces that view,” Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, a trading firm.

Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, said the drop in unemployment benefit claims reflects relief among businesses that consumer demand didn’t plunge this fall as some had feared.

“We expect claims to head slowly downwards for the foreseeable future, and in due course payroll growth will accelerate,” Shepherdson said in a note to clients.

Applications that drop below 375,000 _ consistently _ tend to correlate with a steady decline in the unemployment rate.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, the government said last week, down from 9 percent the previous month. Still, the rate dropped last month in part because more people gave up looking for work. Once the unemployed stop looking for jobs and drop out of the work force, they are no longer counted as unemployed.

Employers added a net total of 120,000 jobs last month. The economy has generated 100,000 or more jobs five months in a row _ the first time that has happened since April 2006 no faxing payday loans.

Many economists expect growth to accelerate in the final three months of the year, to about a 3 percent annual rate. That would be an improvement from 2 percent growth in the July-September period.

But the U.S. economy is vulnerable to shocks from overseas. European leaders are struggling to contain a two-year old debt crisis and the 17 nations that use the euro may already be in recession, economists say.

That could slow U.S. exports and cut into overseas profits earned by U.S. multinationals. Even worse, the crisis could force European banks to cut back on lending and U.S. banks to follow suit, leading to a credit crunch. Most economists are penciling in slower U.S. growth next year, partly because of Europe’s slowdown.

Fewer people are receiving unemployment benefits, and the number of people on extended benefits also fell. Some of that decline is because those out of work found jobs. But economists think most have likely used up all their benefits.

The number of people receiving benefits fell by 174,000 to 3.58 million. But that doesn’t include several million people receiving aid under extended programs put in place during the recession. All told, 6.6 million people received unemployment aid in the week ending Nov. 19, the latest data available. That’s about 400,000 fewer than the previous week.

Congress is debating whether to continue the extended benefit program, which expires at the end of this year. The program provides up to 99 weeks of benefits in states with high unemployment rates. If the program isn’t continued, the Labor Department estimates that about 1.8 million people could lose benefits by early February.

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How metro areas with more than 1 million people ranked in net domestic migration - the number of people who moved to a place, minus those who moved away — for people age 25 to 34. Does not include foreign immigration.

Annual average for three-year period

1: Riverside, Calif.    +23,147       1: Denver    +10,429

2: Phoenix                +14,220       2: Houston    +9,366

3: Atlanta                 +12,167       3: Dallas    +8.731

4: Houston               +10,992       4: Seattle    +7,451

5: Charlotte              +9,273         5: Austin, Tex.    +7,099

38: St. Louis            -2,349      24: St. Louis    +870

47: Chicago              -13,859         47: Miami    -5,724

48: Miami                  -15,208       48: Detroit    -7,501

49: New Orleans       -18,626         49: Chicago    -9,645

50: New York             -47,027       50: New York    -22,325

51: Los Angeles         -53,795       51: Los Angeles    -24,470

Source: Census/Brookings Institution

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Ashok Kokane sits amid his strawberries at Mumbai’s Crawford Market, a handwritten ledger across his knees and a fan of dirty 10 rupee notes at his hand. The lazy, dust-encrusted ceiling fans above are far past cleaning.

There is a sense of timelessness here, in the lurking cats, the shiny shrine to the fearsome Hindu goddess Durga and the cry “Porter? Porter?” sent up by skinny boys with frayed baskets on their heads. It is a tableau many fear will disappear after the government’s decision last week to give foreign big box retailers like Wal-Mart greater access to India’s huge market.

“When big man comes, small man goes,” Kokane said.

The arrival of modern retailing would hasten a cultural transformation in the way Indians shop and work. The debate now raging _ which has shut down Parliament _ hinges on competing visions of what foreign retailers will mean to agriculture and retail, India’s two largest sources of jobs.

The government argues organized retail will make food cheaper, liberate millions from medieval working conditions and put more money into the hands of desperate farmers. Others say it will deepen the inequities of Indian society and wipe out a merchant class whose values and skills have been passed from father to son for generations.

The existing retail landscape is an intricate tangle of shops and bazaars, forged by ideas that date back to India’s earliest religious texts. But, even without Wal-Mart, small, family run shops are already under threat. With the fraying of caste ties, which often determine a family’s profession, and the growing dreams of India’s youth for better paid, more prestigious jobs, retailers are finding it hard to keep the next generation in the family business.

“You have different sets of people who, because of the caste system, have been involved in the same business for many generations,” said Arvind Singhal, founder of Technopak Advisors, a New Delhi based consulting company. These days, he said, “A shopkeeper’s son may not be a shopkeeper.”

Today, organized retail accounts for just 5.5 percent of India’s $470 billion retail market, according to Technopak. Food accounts for about 70 percent of the retail market, which Technopak expects will hit $675 billion by 2016.

Existing domestic supermarkets, like Reliance’s Fresh, Godrej’s Nature’s Basket and Tata’s Westside, have struggled to succeed.

Some sell, at exorbitant prices, rotten dairy goods, pasta infested with bugs and icy $12 pints of Haagen Dazs, repeatedly thawed and refrozen.

Stocking irregularities mean those last cans of Italian plum tomatoes might not be replaced for a month. Shoppers sometimes put back items because the clerk can’t figure out how to get his computer to register the bar code.

“The traditional retailer in India can offer better value than some of the large, organized players,” Singhal said.

The best local shops are marvels of service and quality, bundled with a nice human touch. If you’re short money, you can pay next time. If you want a fistful of flat-leafed parsley or a special pan, they can get it in a day or two. Every organized urban household has a raft of phone numbers for home delivery of cat food, toilet paper, chickens and pretty much anything else.

Yet there are severe drawbacks to the system cash advance today.

India’s market and roadside stalls employ, at backbreaking rates, armies of slim men pedaling rusted bicycles stacked improbably high with eggs for delivery. They run up dark staircases offering fresh rolls wrapped in newspaper and carry cases of bottled water on their heads two and three at a time.

“No one benefits from this kind of employment,” Singhal said. “People are hardly getting money for those jobs.” Far better _ and cheaper for the retailer, he argues _ to hire one well-trained, decently paid person than five low paid workers and spur a virtuous cycle of rising productivity and increased consumption.

Many argue that retailing in India is not yet a zero-sum game: Demand is growing fast enough that big and small players can thrive side by side. The Ministry of Commerce noted that in China, more than 600 hypermarkets opened between 1996 and 2001 but the number of small stores grew too: from 1.9 million to over 2.5 million.

The ministry predicts modernization will create some 10 million new jobs in areas like food processing and transport, as well as in the new retail outlets. They say the more open policy will drive down skyrocketing food prices and help millions of farmers get more money for their crops by eliminating waste and middlemen.

Others say the changes will hurt small farmers at the backbone of India’s rural economy, pushing more of them off the land with few tools to forge a better life elsewhere.

P. Sainath, who has been writing about rural India for 18 years, believes big retail won’t heal the inequities of rural India which have driven over 250,000 farmers to kill themselves since 1995. If anything, he said, it will make them worse.

“One to 2 percent of farmers _ some possibly members of Parliament _ will make a killing. They are the giant farmers,” he said.

Big companies tend to build on existing chains of exploitation, using wholesale agents who extract low prices from unorganized, indebted farmers, whose pricing power will erode further with multinationals, he said. Many of the demonized middlemen, he added, are actually poor women, unlikely to survive the arrival of foreign retail.

“You have no idea of the chaos you are unleashing,” he said.

Reza Meghani, who runs Metro Dry Fruits _ a small stall that has been selling some of the Mumbai’s best dried fruit and nuts for 22 years _ remains confident.

Mumbai’s existing supermarkets haven’t hurt him: They have higher overhead, compromise on quality and charge too much, he said. They can’t compete with the tenderness with which he discusses the eight varieties of almonds he imports from America and Iran.

“We can compete. We will have to compromise on our margins,” said Meghani, 56, who is grooming his son to take over.

Neha Sheikh, 23, says her family has been shopping at his stall for a decade. “The salesperson is really good,” she said. “He’s going to help you out in every little thing.” She doesn’t buy nuts from supermarkets because they’re too expensive.

But if they were cheaper? “Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”

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U.S. stock futures are slipping after disappointing corporate earnings and another sign that Europe’s credit crisis isn’t solved.

Moody’s warned late Monday that it may downgrade France’s top-notch credit rating in the next three months. That country’s finance minister said Tuesday that the French economy may grow at a slower pace than expected.

In the U.S., International Business Machines Corp. fell 4 percent in premarket trading after missing Wall Street’s revenue estimates last quarter free online credit report.

Goldman Sachs, Apple and Intel will release earnings by the end of the day.

Two hours before the market opened, Dow futures fell 34 points, or 0.3 percent, to 11,267. S&P 500 futures lost 2, or 0.2 percent, to 1,191. Nasdaq 100 futures gained 7, or 0.3 percent, to 2,327.

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The world’s largest ticket sellers and the world’s largest social network have created a new interactive venture to let people buy concert and sports tickets near their friends.

Their Facebook friends.

So far, 9,000 events are linked to the interactive seat-selection maps.

“All of our NHL clients are using it. The Air Canada Centre is using it for the Raptors, and we have basic concern configurations done for them,” Kip Levin, executive vice president of E-commerce at Live Nation, told the Star on Thursday.

Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, where North American revenue dropped 11 per cent last year, and new CEO Nathan Hubbard has declared the future lies in social media.

“The Number 1 driver here is just to make the experience better,” said Levin. “A lot of events are social, so it’s valuable to you as a consumer.”

Another driver is the fact that 40 per cent of tickets for some events go unsold on average, often because potential buyers were unaware of the event.

Ticketmaster is hoping concert or game fans will also recommend an upcoming event on Facebook so their friends might know about it and then buy tickets, Levin said.

With this new feature, ticket buyers can tag their seat purchase through their Facebook site. Before they buy a ticket, they can see where other Facebook friends who’ve also tagged their purchases are sitting.

Facebook gets no money from the deal, said Levin, but “our clients have the option of taking the information and extending it into their ad units for sponsored stories.”

Acknowledging Facebook users’ ire over privacy controls, the feature allows a ticket buyer to limit who on Facebook can see their purchase.

The electronically generated information also gives Ticketmaster another level of spurring sales, he said.

“We know you bought Leafs’ tickets in the past, so now we can recommend games that you’ll know you have friends going to.”

About 75 per cent of the people who use Ticketmaster.com also use Facebook, Ticketmaster said on its blog.E

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The Dow Jones industrial average notched a three-day win streak Monday for the first time in six weeks. A $19 billion corporate buying spree and encouraging economic news from Japan sent the Dow up 213 points and erased its losses from last week.

The return of what’s called “Merger Monday” on Wall Street made investors more optimistic about the future. So did a report that Japan’s economy shrank less than feared after the earthquake and tsunami there on March 11. That helped ease worries that the U.S. economy may slide into another recession.

The Dow rose 213.88 points, or 1.9 percent to 11,482.90. It has gained 763 points since Thursday. That’s the best three-day point gain since it rose 927 in November 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis. The Dow is also up 7.1 percent over the three days, the biggest percentage gain since it rose 9.5 percent the first three days of the bull market in March 2009.

Markets may have stabilized the last three days, but financial analysts warned investors not to assume that stocks have fully settled down after last week’s swings. The Dow rose or fell by at least 400 points in four straight days for the first time. The first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating triggered the volatility. It was worsened by concerns that Europe’s debt problems are worsening and that the U.S. economy is weakening.

“You might have these moments of quiet, but the debt crisis in Europe did not go away,” said John Hailer, chief executive for the U cash advance in one hour.S. and Asia of Natixis Global Asset Management. “Our issues with the debt, with what our tax policy is going to be going forward, our unemployment did not go away.”

“We are probably going to have to look at some very different levels of volatility than what a lot of investors grew up with over the last 25 to 30 years,” he said.

A period of relative stability has been common in past volatile markets. In 2008, stocks plunged between mid-September and mid-November. From mid-November until the beginning of January 2009, the Dow was in a lull of sorts. It ratcheted up and down, mostly in the high 8,000 range. But in early January 2009, it began to plunge again and finally hit bottom at 6,547 on March 9.

Despite its three-day gain, the Dow remains down 9.8 percent since its most recent high on July 21 and down 10.4 percent since its 2011 high set on April 29.

More swings could come this week. Leaders of France and Germany meet today to discuss Europe’s debt problems. Spain and other countries have borrowed so much that they may need help to repay their bills. Also today, investors will get an update on how Spain’s economy did during the second quarter.

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