Joe Nocera, the people's choice, is now on the Times' op-ed page. Today he has a column on this week's LinkedIn I.P.O., and he's not celebrating. The stock more than doubled in price on the first day; but there's a catch:

For a small company with less than $16 million in profits last year, $352 million in the bank sounds pretty wonderful, doesnt it? But it really wasnt wonderful at all. When LinkedIns shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, they opened not at $45, or anywhere near it. The opening price was $83 a share, some 84 percent higher than the I.P.O. price. By the time the clock had struck noon, the stock had vaulted to more than $120 a share, before settling down to $94.25 at the markets close. The first-day gain was close to 110 percent.I have no doubt that most everyone at LinkedIn was thrilled to see the run-up; most executives at start-ups usually are. An I.P.O. is an important marker for any company. And, of course, the executives themselves are suddenly rich. But, in reality, LinkedIn was scammed by its bankers.The fact that the stock more than doubled on its first day of trading something the investment bankers, with their fingers on the pulse of the market, absolutely must have known would happen means that hundreds of millions of additional dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn wound up in the hands of investors that Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch wanted to do favors for. Most of those investors, I guarantee, sold the stock during the morning run-up. Its the easiest money you can make on Wall Street.As Eric Tilenius, the general manager of Zynga, wrote on Facebook: A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.

Here's the rest. But it's also worth checking the "Comments" for some further takes on the story.