BEIJING – China’s government will sell pork from stockpiles to dampen inflation that pushed up the price of its staple meat by 57 percent last month, the Commerce Ministry said Friday.

Beijing will release both frozen pork and live pigs into the market, said a ministry spokesman, Yao Jian. He gave no details but said some local governments began to sell their own stockpiles last month.

“We will release both central and local reserves into the market in due time,” Yao said at a regular ministry briefing.

Economists blame China’s inflation spike on higher demand driven by rising incomes that is outstripping food supplies and a flood of bank lending that was part of Beijing’s response to the 2008 global economic crisis.

Inflation is politically dangerous for the ruling communists because it undermines the public’s economic gains and might fuel unrest.

China is expected to produce about 51.5 million tons of pork this year, up 3 percent from 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food inflation has been boosted in recent weeks by summer floods that damaged crops in China’s south and east.

Yao said the jump in pork prices has been driven by higher grain costs, fewer pigs being raised and higher labor costs.

China’s top economic official, Premier Wen Jiabao, ordered local leaders last weekend to take steps to ensure adequate pork supplies and hold down prices, according to a Cabinet statement.

Wen said ensuring stable pork prices is the government’s “unavoidable responsibility.”

NEW YORK (AFP) – Shares of social network LinkedIn more than doubled in price after launching on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday in a tech stock feeding frenzy reminiscent of the infamous dot-com boom.

LinkedIn stock topped $100 a share at times but hovered just below that as the market neared its close.

The career and business oriented online social networking service launched its stock at $45 per share at the start of the day.

“It’s just really good timing, when everybody’s paying attention to technology in a new light,” said Cantor Fitzgerald US market analyst Marc Pado.

The company raised some $353 million from investors Wednesday after jacking up its initial public offering (IPO) price by 30 percent to take advantage of a hungry demand for the first major US social network firm to go public.

The IPO launch price was far higher than the $32-35 range announced just a week earlier and valued the company at $4.25 billion. LinkedIn had revenues of $243 million and a net profit of $3.42 million last year.

If the share price holds near the $100 mark, LinkedIn’s market value will be closer to $10 billion.

LinkedIn had the most valuable US Internet IPO since Google became a publically traded company in 2004, according to research firm Renaissance Capital, which specializes in newly public companies.

The showing by LinkedIn could “pave the way for other social networking firms to take the IPO plunge,” Renaissance maintained.

The LinkedIn debut was the first big test of demand for Internet stocks in years.

The fervor to get hold of the shares raised comparisons to the dot-com bubble that famously burst in January 2000, sending the tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange plummeting.

The index today remains 40 percent below its peak.

Investors hunger for stakes in hot social networking firms such as Facebook and Twitter, which have remained private while capturing fans and influencing lifestyles around the world.

“They want exposure to those types of companies, social networking companies, and LinkedIn was their first chance,” said Morningstar analyst Bill Buhr. “It looks like everybody took it.”

LinkedIn reaped the benefit of being a “proxy” for Facebook and Twitter in the eyes of investors, according to the analyst.

“That’s got to be part of what’s driving this,” Buhr said.

“It’s not yet a bubble,” he continued. “We need to see what the other firms do.”

Social networking titan Facebook is believed to be planning an IPO next year.

It will be important to see whether LinkedIn lives up to investors hopes in the coming year or two, according to analysts. Morningstar advised investors that it felt LinkedIn shares were overpriced.

“The industry is young, but we are very positive on the prospects for the company,” Morningstar senior analyst Rick Summer said in an online post.

“Still, even good companies should be bought for less than they are worth.”

Renren, China’s largest social network, went public on May 4 at an IPO price of $14. The shares soared in the first few days of trading, but since have fallen and closed Wednesday at $13.70.

LinkedIn brings together people online to cultivate and manage their careers and business networks.

It has more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories, with 44 million in the United States.

The California company launched in 2003 and is raising the money to fuel expansion.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – LinkedIn Corp’s shares more than doubled in their public trading debut on Thursday, evoking memories of the investor love affair with Internet stocks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

Shares of the online professional social networking company soared as much as 171 percent, or $76.97, to $121.97 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange — far exceeding the $45 initial public offering price.

The stampede brings the valuation of LinkedIn, which less than a decade ago was no more than an ambitious idea and a computer in one man’s living room, to as high as $11 billion, depending on the stock price at the moment.

Just two weeks ago, LinkedIn proposed a price range for the IPO that valued it at just over $3 billion.

By way of comparison, LinkedIn’s current market value of $9.8 billion is larger than Southwest Airlines Co NYSE Euronext, Clorox.

LinkedIn is the first prominent U.S. social networking company to publicly test just how hungry investors are for anything social media-related on the Web such as Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga.

Such exuberant debut trading in recent years has been the prerogative of Chinese Internet stocks, unmatched by their U.S. peers. LinkedIn is the first U.S. Web company to replicate the jump, marking the biggest first-day price jump since shares of Baidu Inc, a Chinese Internet search engine, rose 354 percent in their Nasdaq debut in 2005.

Like Facebook, Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn allows users to create profile pages displaying a picture and details about themselves.

While Facebook often has more informal profiles that may include a photo album from a recent trip, for example, LinkedIn is seen as the place for a professional persona. The profile pages are basically an online database of electronic resumes.

The company’s 2010 net income was $3.4 million attributable to common stockholders on net revenue of $243.1 million.

As of March 31, LinkedIn had 1,288 employees and 102 million registered members. Based on LinkedIn’s current market value, each of those users is valued at about $96.

MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES, OH MY!

LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner — a newly minted millionaire — shrugged off the trading craze or even worries that the pricing underestimated the appetite for the stock.

“Speaking for myself, personally I’m not even thinking twice about where the price is today and leaving money on the table or even anything remotely along those lines,” he said, adding that the stock “will take care of itself.”

He also cautioned against viewing LinkedIn as a proxy for other potential big-name IPOs, saying those stocks would also be driven by their fundamental value — which are, in turn, far from echoes of the dot-com bubble.

Weiner, who sold about 5 percent of his holdings in the offering, made $5.2 million on the IPO. Based on the latest stock price, his remaining stake in LinkedIn is worth almost $230 million.

LinkedIn’s co-founder and ex-PayPal executive Reid Hoffman made $5.2 million selling less than 1 percent of his shares. His remaining stake in the company — 21.7 percent of the voting power — is now worth nearly $2 billion.

The company raised $352.8 million on Wednesday by selling 8 percent of the company, or 7.84 million shares, for $45 apiece. The company increased its anticipated price range by $10 on Tuesday to $42 to $45 per share.

From the midpoint of the price range to the current price, shares have more than tripled. Bankers typically try to price an IPO so that the stock rises about 15 percent on the first day of trading — enough to reward investors who made a bet, but not so much that the company and its selling shareholders feel that they could have made substantially more.

“The public market demand turns out to be even stronger, substantially stronger than private market transactions have been implying,” said Jay Ritter, IPO expert and professor of finance at University of Florida.

Private-market trading of LinkedIn shares before the IPO gave the company a valuation of about $3 billion, he said.

The company’s shares were sold at about 17.5 times its 2010 sales. By comparison, Google Inc’s shares are valued at about six times 2010 sales.

Renren Inc shares rose 4.38 percent while MySpace parent News Corp rose 2 percent. Google Inc, owner of YouTube, was little changed.

Underwriters on the IPO were led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin and Alina Selyukh; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Maureen Bavdek and Robert MacMillan)