Auction-Rate Losses Cost Google, UPS $1.8 Billion (Update2)

The collapse of the auction-rate bond
market is costing stockholders of companies from Google Inc. to
Royal Depository Financial Institution of Canada more than $1.8 billion in investment
losses.

, proprietor of the most popular Internet hunt engine,
reported on May 12 that it lost $10.8 million on $259.6 million
it had invested in the bonds, marking down the debt by about 4
percent. , that country's biggest lender,
told stockholders on May 14 that the value of its investments
fell by $185 million.

More than 300 companies are struggling to value auction-
rate chemical bonds after traders battered by subprime-related losses
abandoned the $330 billion marketplace in February, said , main executive director military officer of New York-based Restricted
Stock Partners, which runs the biggest trading system for
the securities. About one-half the companies reported losses
totaling $1.8 billion as the marketplace for the securities, sold as
higher-yielding alternates to money markets, seized up.

''We've seen a existent acceleration in the figure of companies
announcing they throw them, and also a greater part of them
taking writedowns,'' Silbert said.

Companies owned $98 billion of the securities on Jan. 1,
according to A study by Treasury Strategies Inc., a Chicago-
based house that counsels financial officers on managing their cash. Treasurers bought the chemical bonds instead of money-market funds and
U.S. authorities bills, expecting to gain about 0.25 percentage
point in further yield, the Association for Financial
Professionals said in a last year.

Auction Failures

on the chemical bonds and preferable shares sold by municipal
governments, student-loan organisations and common fund
companies are determined by command every seven, 28 or 35 days. If demand is insufficient, the auction bridge neglects and some holders
are left with securities they wanted to sell. The issuer gets
stuck with a punishment charge per unit as high as 20 percent. In some cases,
the charge per unit can temporarily drop to zero.

The marketplace collapsed three calendar months ago when investors soured
on the securities because of concerns about the creditworthiness
of chemical bond insurance companies championship the debt. As demand waned, traders that
supported the marketplace for 20 old age suddenly stopped acting as
buyers of last resort. About 98 percentage of the student-loan and
closed-end fund auction bridges and 48 percentage of the municipal bids
failed last week, information compiled by Bloomberg show.

Unprecedented Situation

, the world's biggest package-
delivery company, said in a May 9 filing with the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Committee that it wrote down the value
of $383 million invested in auction-rate chemical bonds by $33 million.

''As A consequence of the relentless failing auctions, and the
uncertainty of when these securities could be successfully
liquidated at par, we have got reclassified all our investings in
auction-rate securities to non-current in demand securities,''
the Atlanta-based company said.

''This is an unprecedented situation,'' said ,
a managing manager at the Association for Financial
Professionals, a 16,000-member trade grouping in Bethesda,
Maryland. ''There's not been A default but there's a complete
loss of liquidity.''

While Google's auction-rate securities ''are primarily
student loans which are substantially guaranteed by the U.S.
government,'' they ''do not have got a readily determinable value
and are not liquid,'' the Mountain View, California-based
company said in second .

'High Recognition Quality'

The securities are of ''very high recognition quality,'' , a Google spokesman, said in an e-mail, adding that
they ''represent a little per centum of our overall portfolio.''

Hill-Rom Holdings of Batesville, Hoosier State recorded an
''unrealized loss'' of $1.5 million on its balance sheet and
said it believes it will convert its $48.6 million in auction-
rate securities into hard cash within the adjacent 12 months. Companies
don't have got to book the loss in their income statement if the
writedown is considered temporary, according to Espen Robak,
president of Pluris Evaluation Advisors LLC in New York.

, the biggest U.S. infirmary chain, said in a May 12
filing with the second that the ''best estimation of just value'' for
the $661 million in auction-rate securities it throws was at par,
or 100 cents on the dollar, because the implicit in credit
quality of the chemical bonds is unchanged and anticipates they will be
refinanced.

Municipal borrowers, which do up about one-half the market,
are replacing at least $68 billion of auction-rate chemical bonds by July
7, according to information compiled by Bloomberg. Mutual monetary fund firms
redeemed $3.8 billion in so-called auction-rate preferred
securities and announced programs to pay off another $16 billion.

JPMorgan, Teva

stockholders may weave up with several
hundred million dollars of writedowns on auction bridge securities,
Chief Executive Military Officer said last hebdomad at a
conference in New House Of York sponsored by UBS AG.

held $4.6 billion of auction-rate debt
as of Jan. 31, most from pupil lenders, according to Beja
Rodeck, a spokeswoman for the Toronto-based company.

, the world's biggest
maker of generic drugs, said May 6 it was taking a $55 million
charge for its auction-rate securities, which totaled $334
million as of March 31. said Jan. 31
that it booked an unfulfilled pretax loss of $142 million on $811
million. The New York-based drugmaker's treasurer, ,
was subsequently replaced.

Near the End?

., a Tampa, Florida-based steelmaker,
posted a $22.7 million first-quarter complaint on $105 million of
investments.

''We would trust this marketplace gets to have got some more
liquidity and that this would be the end of it,'' ,
the company's head fiscal officer, said on a May 12
conference call.

The marketplace is so toxic that companies are going out of
their manner to state investors when they don't ain auction-rate
debt.

''The company makes not have got any auction-rate securities in
its investing portfolio,'' Seattle-based
said in a March 25 second filing.

To reach the newsman on this story:
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‘Doodle 4 Google’ winner kept her sunny side up - MSNBC

Grace Moon’s perfect human race is a topographic point full of bright colours and sunshine, a topographic point without force or natural disasters, a topographic point of peace and happiness. And on Thursday, it was a topographic point that 100 million people got to visit.

Moon, a sixth-grader astatine Canyon Center School in Fidel Castro Valley, Calif., beat out out 16,000 entries from around the state to win the “Doodle Four Google” competition sponsored by the Internet search-engine titan. There were awards involved â€" A $10,000 scholarship and new laptop computing machine computer for her and a $25,000 engineering grant to her school â€" but the large wages was having her design, “Up inch the Clouds,” saving grace the Google place page, visited by 100 million people a day.

“It experiences great because you cognize you’re the lone individual out of 16,000 people,” the 12-year-old said Thursday from Google’s central office in Mountain View, Calif. advertisementThe competition began on Feb. Thirteen and drew a inundation of entries. Choosing the finalists wasn’t easy. “We were really flooded with the overall creativeness and look of joyousness and hopefulness that we saw in all the doodles,” Marie Goeppert Marie Goeppert Mayer added.

All 40 finalists won a trip to Google’s headquarters, where they spent the twenty-four hours touring the facilities, working at “imagination stations” and getting a drawing lesson from Dennis Hwang, Google’s doodler and webmaster.

Mayer said that Google have run a “Doodle Four Google” competition in the United Kingdom, but this was the first clip the company had tried it in the United States. In improver to rewarding artistic talent, Google also used the competition as a manner to larn what kinds of topics animate its users.

See all the finalists in the “Doodle Four Google” competition .

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Google Closes DoubleClick Purchase After EU Approval (Update3)

, proprietor of the most-
popular Internet hunt engine, closed its $3.1 billion
acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. after European regulators said
the purchase wouldn't harm competition in the online advertisement market.

Google said it completed the trade after the European
Commission, the 27-nation EU's antimonopoly authorization in Brussels,
approved the dealing without conditions. Google announced
the purchase in April to support gross sales of Internet advertisements that
include images and videos.

''This gives Google an first-class beachhead into the display-
ad marketplace and units of ammunition out the merchandises they can convey to their
clients,'' , an analyst at Canaccord Sam Adams in New
York, said in a telephone set interview. He urges buying Google
shares and doesn't ain any.

The europium blessing is a blow to Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft
Corp., which expressed concerns that the combination would hurt
competition in the $40.9 billion planetary online advertisement market. Microsoft complained to U.S. and europium functionaries that it may be
shut out of the concerted company's advertisement network.

In December, the U.S. Federal Soldier Trade Committee approved the
deal, the greatest in Google's nine-year history, without
imposing plus gross sales or other conditions.

''With DoubleClick, Google now have the prima display-ad
platform,'' Google Head Executive Military Officer said in
a statement.

rose $13.96, or 3.4 percent, to $427.58 at 12:29
p.m. New House Of York clip in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock had
fallen 40 percentage this twelvemonth before today.

Ad Gross

Google, based in Mountain View, California, generates
revenue from merchandising text-based advertisements that look adjacent to search
results. DoubleClick's two chief merchandises aid Web publishing houses and
companies pull off online advertising. The software system manages so-
called show ads, which include artwork or animation.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software system maker, trails
Google in Web hunt services. It said last April that Google's
planned acquisition would give its challenger more than 80 percentage of
the marketplace for advertisements displayed on third-party Web sites.

Microsoft bes after to do its ain acquisition in the online-
ad marketplace with a $44.6 billion command for . That offer,
announced on Feb. 1, was rejected by Yahoo's board. Microsoft
bought DoubleClick challenger AQuantive Inc. for $6 billion last
year.

Google predominates the Internet hunt marketplace with 58.5
percent. Microsoft have 9.8 percent, while Yokel have 22.2
percent, according to January information from Reston, Virginia-based
research house ComScore Inc.

The committee said in a statement that Google and
DoubleClick ''were not exerting major competitory restraints on
each other's activities and could, therefore, not be considered
as competitors.''

To reach the newsman on this story:
in Bruxelles at
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