Morgan Stanley

Facebook's first few days as a public company have been a rocky road. Moving ahead, Mark Zuckerberg would do well to recall the lesson of two other iconoclastic company founders: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The tale of Ben & Jerry bears a bracing similarity to his own.

Not much, and the jokes on you if you think otherwise. As the Facebook IPO makes abundantly clear, ordinary investors need to stop counting on Wall Street to look out for them.

After all the finger pointing over Facebook's rapid share price decline, there is one factor that should have served as warning. Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, cut earnings estimates in the lead-up to the IPO -- while expanding its size and raising its price.

A "modest contagion" for financial stocks "should allow domestically focused financial stocks to stabilize in the coming weeks," despite the JPMorgan Chase trading mess and the "deteriorating conditions in Europe, according to KBW analyst Fred Cannon.

JPMorgan Chase stock lost more than 8% of its value Friday after the bank, the largest in the United States, revealed a monster $2 billion loss in a trading group that manages the risks the bank takes with its own money.

It's unlikely that random people will just give you the money you need to float you through your ordinary fiscal troubles. But they might make you a loan. Peer-to-peer lending, where borrowers bypass big banks and get loans directly from other individuals, is getting bigger all the time.

Recent stress tests on America's big banks reveal that the financial crisis is far from over. While the "too big to fails" are in better shape than they were in 2008, there's still "room for improvement at virtually every firm."

Over the past couple of weeks, with little fanfare, three small brokerages bit the dust due to a dearth of trading activity on the stock markets and a lack of capital in-house. This may not matter much, but it could be the beginning of a wave of failures on Wall Street.

With the economy still trying to muster a recovery, and unemployment still around 8.5%, any price increases are painful. And just a month into 2012, a spate of headlines points to more hurt ahead. Here are seven ways inflation will be digging into your wallet this year:

The biggest bank in America isn't the one you might think: JPMorgan Chase recently knocked longtime rival Bank of America out of the top spot. But is bigger better? Not when it comes to customer service.