One can only imagine the endorphins pumping across the world’s trading desks. The king of the hill, JPMorgan, has seen its killer trade — reputed to entail multiple hundreds of billions of credit default swap notional amount — go the wrong way, and now they need to reverse out of their position before the stink gets worse. The loss of two billion dollars announced a week ago grew by a billion in a week, and clearly the fire sale is not over.

Faced with a public relations fiasco, Jamie Dimon let his long-time, trusted lieutenant, Ina Drew, take the fall. Meanwhile, Iksil — the trader that amassed the positions that have been a topic online since early April — cannot be let go because he is the one that understands the billions and billions of complex derivative contracts that now need to be unwound. It must be quite a spectacle on derivatives trading desks around the world. It is get-back time, and in that world no one takes any prisoners.

As the hedge funds continue to circle in the water, feeding off of JPMorgan’s exposed balance sheet, Dimon’s friends on Capitol Hill have been quick to come to his defense. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) was quick to minimize the importance of one loss, whatever its size, while across the aisle President Obama lauded Dimon’s bona fides and JPMorgan as “one of the best-managed banks there is.”

Politicians jumping to Jamie Dimon’s defense are missing the point. This is not about a single trade or one loss. Iksil, whose nicknames “Voldemort” and the “White Whale” (think Ahab’s nemesis, not a fat Frenchman) should give a hint as to his industry reputation, and now that the hedge funds have tasted blood JP cannot get out until the counterparties are good and ready. That the loss is still growing simply means that they are not ready to let go.

But if JP’s counterparties have Bruno by the balls, so too does Dimon have a firm grip on the nation’s political leadership. Last week on Meet the Press, Jamie Dimon described himself as still a Democrat, but just barely. Once a prominent Obama supporter, Dimon is one of many across the finance community who feel that they have been unfairly tarred for cratering the global economy.

To put a finer point on it, despite the media feeding frenzy surrounding Voldemort’s personal Black Swan event (Nicholas Taleeb’s now-famous phrase for things that can’t go wrong, until they do) comments from our nation’s capital remain measured, almost fawning. Democrats and Republicans have fallen over each other to praise Dimon as America’s Greatest Risk Manager notwithstanding JPMorgan’s contretemps. Dimon’s reputation grew out of the ease with which JPMorgan navigated the financial crisis, though some have suggested that Dimon’s predecessor as CEO, Bill Harrison, deserves a fair share of the credit. Harrison, apparently, minimized the bank’s exposure to exotic mortgage derivatives and handed Dimon a pretty clean balance sheet when Dimon arrived on the scene as CEO in 2006.

While some of the adulation garnered by Dimon may well be warranted, it is likely that most of the politicians uttering the hosannas have no idea what risk management is. It may be that what we are actually watching is a not very subtle food fight between our two political parties for campaign cash. Simply stated, this is not about Dimon’s management skills, rather it is about his wallet.

Over the past two decades, the financial services sector has been the most generous source of political money, and that money has been up for grabs. For decades, the Republican Party was the party of Wall Street. That singular identity ended during the Clinton administration, which was determined to lure Wall Street’s lucre across the aisle. While Clinton and the Democrats grabbed the golden ring, the price for the nation was steep: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the ensuing Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that together laid the groundwork for the financial services world as we know it, and as the world came to experience it in the global financial meltdown of 2008. During the last presidential cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, the financial sector remained far and away the largest source of political contributions, with 54 percent going to Democrats, while this time around — in the wake of industry anger over Dodd-Frank reforms — the tide has turned and 77 percent of that money is gracing Republican coffers.

Could it be that Chairman Bachus was quick to rise to the defense of JPMorgan because that bank has been the leading source of contributions to his campaigns over the course of his career? Could it be that President Obama is treading lightly on the issue because to date he appears to have lost his edge with two of his largest financial supporters from 2008 — Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan — who according to OpenSecrets.org are the two largest sources of contributions to the Romney campaign?

It is getting boring reading about how the events of the past week — to say nothing of the past decade — suggest why our banks should be smaller or risk trading functions separated from traditional commercial banking. Democrats that continue to believe that we can regulate our way out of this either don’t want to give up their share of the money or simply lack imagination. Banks should be smaller so they can fail with the regularity with which small banks do fail. JP’s oft-repeated argument that their nearly one hundred trillion dollars derivatives book is book-matched and therefore does not constitute a systemic risk to the financial system is disingenuous at best and simply dishonest at worst.

Lost in the endless — and endlessly self-serving — arguments is the fact that commercial banking is essential to the economy, and thus is supported by numerous institutions including the FDIC and the Fed — and that the integration of investment banking and commercial banking (a brainchild of Dimon’s mentor Sandy Weill) has brought little to no demonstrable value to commercial banking’s core societal function, while bringing much to the investment banking world — massive bonuses, a bottomless supply of free capital and the socialization of trading risk.

Both Jamie Dimon and our nation’s political leaders face the same fundamental problem: As risky as the status quo might be, no one can afford to give it up. For Jamie Dimon, derivatives trading is a gravy train that has underpinned JPMorgan’s profitability, regardless of the larger threat it may entail, while for our political leaders major contributors are an irreplaceable constituency always for sale to the highest bidder.

But don’t worry about Bruno Iksil. Whether Jamie Dimon finds he has to let him go, or figures out a way to keep him, he will be fine. There will always be a market for a proven derivatives trader, particularly one with the moniker of the true master of the universe. He will not be tainted by this trade, no matter what the final damage turns out to be, or at least not for long. After all, take a look at his new boss who took over from Ina Drew. He was formerly a trader at Long-term Capital Management.

Enormous debt accumulated over decades sent the country into a recession so deep it kills 200 businesses and 900 jobs every day. Elections this month failed to produce a government, and Greeks will vote again in June. Meanwhile, life for most Greeks continues to get worse.

“Every day I see more people sleeping rough on the street,” said Spachos, 72. “They can’t even wash their clothes or themselves. … It worries me.”

Spachos, who has been staying with different friends in recent months, may soon join them. A former doctor, he could not afford to retire and found work as a hospital orderly. But as Greece’s woes mounted so did his own, and he lost his job, then two more: one as a gardener and one as a groundskeeper.

Now, he is unemployed and homeless, and spoke this week at a municipal soup kitchen, where he ate a plastic bowl of bean soup, a thick slice of bread and a banana.

“I am ashamed to be here,” Spachos said, his eyes filling with tears. “My heart is broken.”

“Greeks have fight in them, so maybe things will improve in a couple of years,” he said, opening his shirt to reveal a scar from surgery to implant a pacemaker. “But I won’t be around to see it.”

Here is a look at some of Greece’s problems as it struggles to pay its debts:

UNEMPLOYMENT

Over the past three years unemployment has roughly doubled, and Greece has lost more than 10 percent of its output.

Nearly 320,000 people lost their jobs in the 12-month period ending in February, pushing the unemployment rate to 22 percent. Greece’s 3.8 million employed people are supporting the 4.5 million who don’t work – 1.1 million officially unemployed and 3.4 million considered financially inactive.

BUSINESS WOES

Some 80,000 businesses were shuttered last year, and 136,000 more are expected to fail in 2012, according to estimates from the Athens Chamber of Commerce.

“Out of 900,000 businesses currently operating, that would be a major blow,” said Constantine Michalos, the chamber’s president. “I fear the (next) government may be called upon to administer the ruins of the Greek economy.”

CRIME

The Public Order Ministry has reported an increase in nearly all categories of crime between 2010 and 2011, with murder up 5 percent and armed robberies in occupied homes up 110 percent.

HOMELESSNESSS

Homelessness, the most visible sign of Greece’s financial despair, has risen by around 25 percent, according to estimates by a state-funded relief agency. That number includes more people from traditionally stable background such as high school and university graduates.

HEALTH PROBLEMS

Greece’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 954 new HIV infections in 2011, a 57 percent increase from the previous year. It attributes most of the rise to drug use.

DEPRESSION

All these problems have led to a general rise in depression. According to several state-funded health and relief agencies, rates of suicide, drug dependency and depression have all broadly risen by 20 to 25 percent since the financial crisis hit in late 2009.

The research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, incorporated the results of several experiments carried out by the researchers. For one of the experiments, the researchers had study participants come up with specific plans to accomplish either one goal or six goals over a five-day period.

The researchers found that for people with just one goal, having a plan in place helped them to accomplish it. But that planning didn’t help the people who had to accomplish six goals.

This may be because people become overwhelmed when they think of all that has to go in to accomplishing several goals, as well as the applicable obstacles.

“The present findings suggest that when people form specific plans for multiple goals, the difficulty of goal execution becomes more salient, commitment falters, and people fail to follow through on their good intentions,” the researchers wrote in the study.

However, they did find that people were more likely to think it was doable to accomplish multiple goals if they kept in mind that other people have even more goals to accomplish.

Recently, a study in the Journal of Communication showed that even though doing multiple things at once leads to lower quality of work and added stress, we do it because it makes us feel better emotionally.

In that study, researchers found that people were more likely to multitask if they needed to work, study or complete a habitual task. But the researchers found that multitasking wasn’t actually effective in terms of fulfilling those needs.

WASHINGTON — Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama’s re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth.

The latest Democratic complaint came after House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that when Congress raises the nation’s borrowing cap in early 2013, he will again insist on big spending cuts to offset the increase. Boehner, R-Ohio, continues to reject higher tax rates, which Democrats demand from the wealthy.

That led Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to say Boehner is virtually assuring another debt-ceiling crisis as bad or worse than the one that shook financial markets nine months ago.

“The last thing the country needs is a rerun of last summer’s debacle that nearly brought down our economy,” Schumer said in a statement. In an interview, Schumer added: “I hope that the speaker is not doing this because he doesn’t want to see the economy improve, because what he said will certainly rattle the markets.”

Boehner responded in a statement: “Republicans have passed nearly 30 bills that would help small businesses create jobs and we are waiting on Senate Democrats to vote on these common-sense measures. The failure to act on these jobs bills, as well as our crushing debt burden, is undermining economic growth and job creation.”

Democrats say Republicans loaded their jobs bills with provisions certain to doom them in the Senate, such as restrictions on unions and on regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Regardless of whether Schumer’s suspicions are right, there’s evidence that unceasing partisan gridlock and the prospect of big tax increases and spending cuts in January are causing some companies to postpone expansions. Even small economic slowdowns are bad news for Obama, who is seeking re-election amid high unemployment.

The Washington Post this past week compiled a list of military contractors, hospitals and universities that are delaying hires and bracing for cuts, partly because of fears that Washington’s partisan divisions will not abate.

The most obvious showdown will happen soon after the Nov. 6 election. Unless a lame-duck Congress can make deals, the economy will suffer a double whammy of large tax increases and spending cuts, starting Jan. 1. The tax increases would hit virtually every working American and the spending cuts would affect military and domestic programs.

Economists say that what Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke calls a “fiscal cliff” could possibly lead to another severe recession.

On top of that, perhaps by late January or so, Congress and the president – be it Obama or Republican Mitt Romney – will again confront the need to raise the country’s borrowing limit or else trigger a first-ever government failure to pay its debts. A partisan showdown over this issue last summer led to a downgrade in the nation’s credit worthiness and a sharp stock market drop.

These crucial decisions will occur after the presidential election. But investors, planners and business owners make decisions about hiring, expansion and investments months in advance. The more they worry about a serious economic downturn in nine months or so, the more reluctant they are to expand operations and hire workers now.

“All that uncertainty has us cautious, and we’re scaling back our hiring expectations,” said Eric Remington, vice president of Kaman Corp., which recently canceled plans to hire 200 new workers at a defense aerospace plant in Jacksonville, Fla.

“The law is, the automatic cuts will take effect on Jan. 1,” he said. “Everyone says, `Don’t worry, that won’t happen.’ But we’ve got a business to run, and we’ve got to plan.”

Schumer and other top Democrats have said for months that GOP lawmakers may be trying to strangle the economic recovery for political reasons.

“Their strategy is to suffocate the economy for the sake of what they think will be a political victory,” Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, wrote in an email to supporters last October, when Congress was debating a jobs bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said his Republican counterpart was not cooperating on that legislation “in hopes that he can get my job, perhaps.”

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, told The Associated Press last year that some GOP lawmakers, “through their intransigence, cleverly set up a situation for America’s economy to fail, either by needlessly driving us to default, or needlessly driving us into massive public-sector layoffs.”

Federal, state and local government layoffs have been under way for months. They may be necessary to reduce deficits and survive recessions. But they increase unemployment, a problem for any president seeking a second term.

Since February 2010, when the economy began consistently adding jobs, the private sector has gained 4.2 million positions. But federal, state and local governments during that time have cut more than 500,000 jobs.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California did not ascribe partisan motives to Boehner’s latest warnings about the next debt ceiling showdown. But she said he may be unnecessarily hurting the economy. “It already can be damaging, just the fact that it’s brought up,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday.

Republicans say it’s absurd to make such an accusation. They point to bipartisan efforts to pass jobs-creation bills, trade pacts and, after some arguments, an extension of the payroll tax cut that Obama originally had proposed for only one year.

GOP lawmakers want Congress to act this year to ensure that none of the Bush-era income tax cuts will expire, as scheduled, on Jan. 1. Such assurance, they say, could lead investors and business owners to start expanding and hiring now.

Democrats say the move, by itself, would increase the deficit dramatically. They want to end the tax cuts for the wealthiest and they note that the economy boomed during Bill Clinton’s presidency, before the big tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted.

Boehner’s aides say the speaker supports tax law changes, including eliminating some loopholes and exemptions, that could result in greater revenue even if rates remain the same or are reduced.

As for the debt limit, “allowing America to default would be irresponsible,” Boehner said Tuesday at an economic forum. “But it would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process.”

Democrats say that’s precisely the type of economic saber-rattling that can frighten investors and employers, and damage Obama’s re-election hopes. Boehner disagrees.

“I said that we should not wait until the 11th hour to address these issues,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “The only ones who are talking about drama or brinksmanship are my Democrat colleagues.”

The danger of another credit-rating downgrade “comes from continued inaction on the deficit, and our piling debt,” he said, not from “calls for action.”

As early as 2010, the senior banker who has been blamed for the debacle, Ina Drew, began to lose her grip on the bank’s chief investment office, according to current and former traders. She had guided the bank through some of the most rugged moments of the 2008 financial crisis, earning the trust of Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, in the process.

Facebook shares, marred by technical glitches, rose only 23 cents from its initial price — a disappointing debut for the company. But for the New York Post, the day was nothing less than a betrayal.

“ZUCKERS!” the front page of Saturday’s edition blared. A story inside the paper was just as biting:

They were Mark Zuckerberg’s cash cows.

Hordes of everyday New Yorkers played the fool yesterday to Wall Street fat cats and Facebook insiders, who used a bloated stock price to milk them of billions of dollars during an overhyped IPO.

With a $38-a-share price tag and forecasts for a 10 percent jump, mom-and-pop investors blindly bought in with dreams of instant riches that never came true.

Meanwhile, the social network’s hoodie-wearing CEO finished the day with a net worth of $19.25 billion. The average Facebook employee saw their on-paper wealth shoot up to $2.9 million.

While every boss would like to think he or she is the best manager in the country, the fact is many try — but fail. Some miss the mark a little and others miss the mark quite a ways. If you have a boss like that, there are a few things you can do.

I hope these ideas help or jumpstart your thinking. Have a terrific week.
———————————————————————
Building a Better Relationship with Your Work Partner

1. Look for where you can compliment your work partner’s gaps.
2. Try putting yourself in your manager’s hoes. It’s easy to criticize others’ actions from where we sit.
3. Try to fix any errors quietly and discreetly. Managers don’t want others to know about mistakes they make.
4. Be a good listener.
5. Speak up. If you know a way to help your work partner be more effective, have a better relationship, or streamline a process, then share those ideas.
6. Be a cheerleader. If your work partner does good work, ask if you can send the information to an internal newsletter editor.
7. Most importantly, don’t whine. Most managers automatically shut out the sound of a whining voice.
8. Work on communicating. Must of the friction at work these days is caused by email or voice mail overload, or faxes, or memos that don’t make sense.

“We’re trying to bring a critical mass of people back to the Occupy movement,” said Nicole Powers, an activist and managing editor of Suicide Girls, a website that has extensively chronicled the Occupy movement since it began on Wall Street. “We want to get mass involvement back into the Occupy movement as we move into an election season.”

Protestors plan to gather in Daley Plaza on Friday and on Saturday for a march to the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Sunday brings the climatic event: a march from Grant Park to the McCormick Place convention center, where NATO delegates will be meeting throughout the weekend.

The list of targets is smaller than it used to be. The Group of Eight was originally supposed to meet in Chicago this weekend, but White House officials scrapped the idea after word of the Occupy plans got out. Now the G8 is meeting in the seclusion of Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Occupy protesters have happily taken credit for the move.

Many in Chicago have invoked the historical echoes of earlier protests — the melee at 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the protests of international organizations like NATO that rattled cities around the world in the late-’90s and early-2000s. “I think that this is a historic weekend in Chicago,” said Stephen Weber, an activist who helped organize bus trips for hundreds of activists from eight cities. “The fact that the G8 was supposed to be here and they moved to Camp David is indicative of the power of the narrative and the visibility of discontent in this country and around the world.”

Protesters are not alone in anticipating something akin to the 1968 Chicago riots. The police department has supplied officers with pepper spray and $1 million worth of new riot gear. Cops arrested 20 participants in preliminary protests.

Weber, who helped start the group 99% Solidarity, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, said he opposed NATO because it fights wars and because governments fund those wars with money they should spend elsewhere.

“There’s definitely a connection between the two and I think they’re very important,” Weber said. “My hope is 30 years from now, we won’t have a need for marches like this.”

All that optimism from Republican governors in key presidential election battlegrounds conflicts with the pessimistic message that Mitt Romney is spreading. The GOP presidential candidate is focused on the nation’s fragile economic rebound as he works to persuade Americans to dump President Barack Obama.

“America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs” but instead “we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history,” Romney said this week in Des Moines, Iowa. That’s the same state where GOP Gov. Terry Branstad has been crowing about an unemployment rate that has dropped to 5.1 percent from 5.9 percent a year ago.

It’s just the latest example of how, less than six months before the general election, Romney can end up in an awkward situation as he argues that the economy is deeply troubled while GOP governors salute an economic renaissance in their states.

How can it be both?

“Well, it is both,” McDonnell, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said recently. “Nationally, we’re still in the doldrums because our national economic policies are inept as led by this president: more taxes, more government programs, more regulation, lots of rhetoric and limited results.”

But things are looking up in states like his, he said, adding: “I’d say most of the credit in Virginia goes to the private sector and the entrepreneurs.”

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, hopes to ride a wave of voter discontent with the economy into the White House. No president has won re-election with a national unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. The rate stood at 8.1 percent in April.

Any number of factors, gas prices among them, could shift voter attitudes about the economy between now and Election Day.

To win, Romney must convince voters – especially those in the roughly dozen swing-voting states where the race is likely to be decided – that the situation is so bad that that they should give him a chance to do what Obama hasn’t been able to do: get the economy really going.

Obama says voters should give him four more years so the nation’s recovery can continue, and he warns of a backslide if Romney takes over.

Democrats, like Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, contend the country would be in far worse condition had the president not pumped stimulus money into the economy in 2009, saying it was directly responsible for new jobs. Romney and Republican governors contend that the infusion has acted as a brake on the economy, not the accelerator.

“If our economy had been stimulated differently, we’d be farther along than we are at the present time,” said Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama, a state where the jobless rate fell by 2 percentage points over the past year.

In a way, however, Republican governors, many of them freshmen elected in 2010, aren’t making it easy for Romney to make his case.

McDonnell, for one, spent an entire week canvassing his state and used $400,000 from his own political action committee to run TV ads statewide trumpeting a 2 1/2-year turnaround in job growth and business expansion. Virginia’s unemployment rate fell from 7.3 percent the month he took office in January 2010 – the depth of the crippling recession – to 5.6 percent last month.

“We’ve been rated the top state for business in America,” McDonnell bragged, ticking off citations from several outfits after touring a newly opened circuit board factory in Danville.

Ohio’s Kasich is equally upbeat as he takes credit for 100,000 new or retained jobs since taking office in January 2011and for a new, private job-creation agency called JobsOhio. The state’s unemployment rate ticked down from 7.5 percent in March to 7.4 percent last month.

Michigan’s Snyder beams when he talks about a jobless rate that has fallen by 2.2 percentage points in his state, Romney’s boyhood home, in the past year. And Branstad boasts: “The unemployment rate in Iowa is dropping dramatically, and the kind of jobs that we’re creating are the kinds we want.”

In some cases, the competing messages come across as GOP governors – like McDonnell and Snyder – stand next to Romney to introduce him when he campaigns in their states.

Rising-star Republican governors who are potential Romney vice-presidential picks also are publicly giddy about a thawing jobs market as corporations and small businesses expand, and they point to steadily improving tax collections in their states as proof.

In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley talks up a jobless rate that slid from 12 percent in December 2009 to 8.8 percent in April. Her commerce secretary, Bobby Hitt, says that South Carolina recruited a projected 20,000 jobs and $5.1 billion in investment last year, and the state Commerce Department churns out press releases on every company expansion, whether it creates 10 jobs or 500.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal talks up his state’s unemployment rate (7.1 percent in April) and job growth. Even as the latest Louisiana revenue estimates exposed a $211 million shortfall, Jindal insisted the state’s economic picture wasn’t grim. He notes that Bayou State unemployment rates are below the regional and national averages and points to 44,000 Louisiana jobs added over the past year.

To be sure, it’s not just GOP-governed states that are experiencing economic growth. Forty-eight states have seen a drop in unemployment rates over the past 12 months – New York’s rate increased from 8.0 percent to 8.5 percent, and Rhode Island’s remains unchanged at 11.2 percent. Democratic governors, however, are quick to credit Obama with helping their states rebound.

“Our country has now seen 26 straight months of private-sector job growth under President Obama’s leadership,” said Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. “We are moving in the right direction toward full recovery.”

Ultimately, the presidential race will come down to whether voters feel the economy is improving or stagnating. And the outcome will determine whether Romney and the Republicans are successful in squaring the broader economic criticism with progress in key states.

___(equals)

Bob Lewis reported from Danville and Richmond in Virginia, Phillip Rawls from Montgomery, Ala. Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, Kathy Barks Hoffman in Lansing, Mich., Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Tenn., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

The stock certificate is reminiscent of another era, when hard copy shares were the only way to trade. Now an overwhelming majority of share trading is conducted online with the click of a button. Companies are no longer required to offer printed share certificates, though some still do — for an extra price, of course.

Serious investors seeking Facebook stock will buy shares through a brokerage firm or with an online brokerage account.
However, there is a market for one-time investors who are just looking for a piece of history. Websites, like GiveAShare.com and OneShare.com offer the option of purchasing individual shares, rather than requiring Facebook stock be bought in lots (bundles of 100 stocks).

These websites cater to occasional investors, who are looking to grab a piece of the company, without shelling out several grand.

“It interests people who are not ordinarily interested in the stock market,” Rick Roman, the founder of GiveAShare.com, told CNN Money. “We’ve been getting people asking about it for a year.”

GiveAShare.com allows buyers to purchase individual shares of Facebook, along with the hard copy of the stock certificate for an additional $39 fee.

Other online brokers such as ShareBuilder also allow limited orders for a fee.

Facebook is expected to begin trading today after raising $16 billion in an initial public offering Thursday. The company priced its IPO at $38 a share.

Check out the gallery below to see the biggest Internet IPOs of the past decade.