Count us decidedly unsurprised that a major private equity firm is coming public. We previously described this as a “historic inevitability” due in part to the firm’s partners’ desire to build a “lasting legacy.” That being said there a a number of items this weekend on the Blackstone Group’s purported plans to pursue an initial public offering in the management company.

Roger Ehrenberg at Information Arbitrage thinks investors should “watch their wallets” before investing in a Blackstone IPO.

Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture thinks the rumors are a “trial balloon” and doesn’t believe a deal is going to happen.

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Peter Edmonston in the New York Times on Blackstone’s potential “about face.”

Rob Cox at breakingviews.com on why Blackstone would forgo the benefits of private ownership for public scrutiny.

Mark DeCambre at TheStreet.com how one could view a Blackstone IPO as an “exit strategy.”

Deal Journal with a guess on how much Blackstone earns each year.

DealBook on how much a publicly traded Blackstone may be worth?

Free exchange is now “really confused” but the Blackstone rumors.

Now onto some non-Blackstone related items:

Mark Hulbert in the New York Times on the major valuation disparity between large caps and small caps.

Diya Gullapalli and Tom Lauricella in the Wall Street Journal on why Powershares continues to pump out niche ETFs, and how tracking error has hit ETFs in the market’s most recent time of turmoil.

Conrad de Aenlle in the New York Times on how the emerging markets have achieved a newfound stability.

MarketBeat on how “sub-prime is today’s dot-com – the pin that pricks a much larger bubble.”

Ganesh Rathnam at Morningstar.com is looking for contrarian values in stocks hurt by the subprime mortgage mess.

Greg Newton at NakedShorts on some who underplay the significance of the subprime mortgage mess.

John Spence at Marketwatch.com on the timing of the launch of the iShares Lehman MBS Fixed-Rate Bond Fund (MBB).

Tom Petruno in the Los Angeles Times profiles one of the world’s biggest CDO managers.

Brett Steenbarger at TraderFeed on extreme readings for the equity put/call ratio and how you can repay your favorite bloggers for their (hard) work.

Greg Burns in the Chicago Tribune chronicles the inevitable decline of open-outcry trading and what it means for Chicago’s futures exchanges.

The Economist looks for more market volatility as participants struggle with weak economic data and continued liquidity.

macroblog and Econbrowser on the week’s less than satisfactory inflation numbers.

Tim Harford at Slate.com on why home ownership may paradoxically cause unemployment.

We were recently informed that a new mutual fund site has gone live, MUTUAL decision.

Jay Walker at the Confused Capitalist with a book review from an investment giant.

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