We've reported that Monster, Palm, Intuit, EarthLink and MetroPCS bought $856 million in auction-rate securities. The credit market being what it is these days, these companies are having a hard time getting cash for their paper. Add Google to the bunch. According to a filing with the SEC, Google owns $259.6 million worth — or worthless — of auction-rate securities.

The figure doesn't look very large relative to Google's $12 billion in cash and marketable securities. But thrown in with the $200 million the company chooses not to earn from ads placed on image searches, or the $110 million it could make by tossing the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from the homepage, or the money Google could save by slowing its hiring to just a few thousand engineers a year, and you've got a company that's very fortunate to be in a business where it can throw away substantial amounts of cash without anybody noticing.

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