Google reported earnings and sales for the fourth quarter that missed Wall Street estimates, sending the stock falling after hours.  Shares of the leading Internet search company, which has typically blown away analysts’ forecasts, plunged nearly 9% after the closing bell. The stock had risen about 3% in regular trading Thursday. Google’s stock has taken a hit in recent weeks, dipping nearly 25% below its all-time high of $747 last November.

Google reported that its fourth-quarter revenue came in at $4.83 billion, up 51% from a year ago. Excluding advertising sales that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) shares with partners (also known as traffic acquisition costs or TAC), the company reported revenue of $3.39 billion, below the $3.45 billion analysts had expected, according to Thomson Financial.

Google posted net income of $1.44 billion, or $3.79 a share, up 17% percent from a year ago. Profits, after backing out certain gains and charges, came in at $4.43 per share, narrowly missing Wall Street’s expectations of $4.44 a share.  Many are calling Google recesion proof but I am not quite convinced of that.

School districts, counties and cities across Florida are seekingt to raise cash after being denied access to their deposits in a $14 billion state-run investment fund.  The Jefferson County school district was forced to take out a short-term loan to cover the payroll for the 220 teachers and other employees in the system after $2.7 million it held in the pool was frozen yesterday. At least five other districts also obtained last-minute loans, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.

Florida’s State Board of Administration, manager of the Local Government Investment Pool, halted withdrawals yesterday at an emergency meeting after $13 billion was pulled out this month from participants. Governments from Orange County, home of Disney World, to Pompano Beach asked for their money back following disclosures that the fund held $1.5 billion of downgraded and defaulted debt.

An advisory panel of school and local government officials with money in the frozen investment pool told the fund’s management late today, following a more than two-hour conference call, that they won’t accept a return of less than 100 percent of their investment.  The board said $1 billion was withdrawn from the pool just before the freeze, reducing the fund’s size to $14 billion, a 48 percent decline for the month. Yesterday, state officials said the pool held $15 billion.

By freezing the Florida fund, officials left governments without ready access to cash they are accustomed to drawing upon for routine expenditures. The pool was the largest of its kind in the U.S. at $27 billion before the unprecedented withdrawals.  Wilson at Jefferson County said he plans to withdraw the school district’s money from the pool as soon as he can, and won’t consider investing there again.

A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of former Cendant Corp. Chairman Walter Forbes Monday for leading the largest accounting fraud of the 1990s.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld Forbes’ conviction on conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of making false statements. Forbes was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison and ordered to pay more than $3 billion in restitution.

Forbes was involved in a fraud that inflated revenue by more than $500 million at Cendant’s predecessor, Stamford-based CUC International, to drive up the stock price. The fraud was reported in 1998, causing Cendant’s market value to drop by $14 billion in one day.  The fraud cost the company and 119,000 investors more than $3 billion.

The appeals court concluded that prosecutors’ use of the term “$14 billion fraud” in their opening statement was not misleading and prejudicial. They also said the District Court correctly ruled that references to the company’s decline in stock price and investor losses were permissible.  Last year, Cendant stockholders changed the company’s name to Avis Budget Group (Charts, Fortune 500) to reflect its Avis and Budget vehicle rental brands.  It is well known that he attempted to use offshore banking to hide assets.

The Cendant case was among the first in a series of corporate accounting scandals that sparked outrage from investors in recent years.  The case was tried after two previous juries deadlocked.  Forbes, who testified during the trial, has argued he knew nothing about the fraud. His co-defendant, former Cendant Vice Chairman E. Kirk Shelton, was convicted in 2005 of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud and making false statements to the SEC.  Shelton was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $3.27 billion restitution to the company.

Forbes was chief executive officer of CUC and Shelton was president before the membership marketing operation merged with the travel and real-estate services company HFS Inc. to form New York-based Cendant in December 1997.  Not very suprised at this outcome as the guy is a dirty as a pig rolling in it’s own shit.

 Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) said on Monday it had reassured customers over the merger that created the telecom equipment maker, after uncertainty dented sales in the second quarter.   April-June sales at the network equipment venture, owned equally by Nokia and Siemens, fell more than 10 percent, both from the first quarter and a year earlier.

Some of the total of about 600 customers of the joint venture, formed on April 1, were cautious about placing new orders until they had more details of the company’s product portfolio and strategy, Simon Beresford-Wylie said.  The world’s second-largest mobile networks company after Swedish rival Ericsson, Nokia Siemens has been able to retain most customers, despite aggressive price cuts at Ericsson, Beresford-Wylie said.

Restructuring programs at newly merged Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent gave Ericsson the opportunity to steal market share by undercutting prices, analysts have said.  The NSN chief met clients in Russia, India, China, as well as countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Europe in the last two months to discuss the venture.

Nokia and Siemens merged their networks business partly to be able to weather periods of slow growth better by sharing high fixed costs for research and development and reducing overheads. NSN plans to cut 9,000 jobs as part of plans to save 1.5 billion euros ($2.05 billion) a year.  NSN’s decision last month to base its services business unit in India was part of a larger plan to focus on emerging markets, which will account for 50-60 percent of cell phone users in 2015, Beresford-Wylie said.

About 1.4 billion of the world’s three billion cell phone users are now in China, India and Latin America, he said. Most of the two billion people expected to start owning cell phones in the next eight years would come from emerging markets, including those in the Middle East and Africa, he said.

Nokia, the world’s top cell phone maker, said in August India overtook the United States in the second quarter to become its second-biggest market by sales after China.  Wow, no surprise there!

Japanese firms cut capital spending by 4.9 percent in April-June from a year earlier, data showed on Monday, confounding forecasts and adding to views that the Bank of Japan will hold off from raising rates this month.  I challenge this and think rates will definately be rising.

The first decline in 17 quarters, in sharp contrast with a median forecast by economists for an 11.5 percent rise, signaled that economic growth for the quarter could be revised down from preliminary figures.  The yen was little changed near 115.80 to the dollar after the data’s release, while the Nikkei share average (.N225) opened down 0.35 percent at 16,511.07.

Excluding software, capital spending fell 5.7 percent from a year earlier and was down 10.2 percent from the previous quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis, the survey by the Ministry of Finance showed.  The survey also showed Japanese firms’ recurring profits rose 12.0 percent in April-June, while sales were up 3.3 percent.

Economists watch the ministry’s capital spending data closely as it is used in calculating revised GDP figures for the quarter. April-June GDP will be issued on September 10.  Preliminary data showed Japan’s economy expanded for the 10th straight quarter in April-June but grow slowed to an annualized 0.5 percent from the previous quarter’s 3.2 percent on softness in exports and personal spending.

Brisk business expenditure has been a key driver of Japan’s economy, which is enjoying its longest spell of growth in the postwar era, albeit at a slower pace than in previous booms.  Some economists said the survey’s weakness was partly due to one-off factors.

“The lower-than-expected reading appears to be due to changes in survey samples especially in small and mid-sized firms. As the manufacturing sector showed double-digit growth, corporate capital expenditures are not as weak as the data indicates,” said Takumi Tsunoda, an economist at Shinkin Central Bank Research Institute.  With chances of a September BOJ rate hike fading, market traders will look at the central bank’s tankan corporate sentiment survey, due in early October, for clues on whether a rate hike will come next month.

German lender IKB Industriebank AG, hit by its exposure to the U.S. subprime lending crisis, expects to lose up to €700 million ($954 million) this fiscal year as it aims for a “fresh start,” the company said Monday.

However, the bank - which has won help from the state-owned KfW development bank and other banks to help protect its exposure to subprime mortgage securities - said its “liquidity position for the next six months is covered without raising new capital market funds.”

IKB’s problems sprang from its Rhineland Funding investment vehicle’s apparent inability to cover its funding needs because of exposure to U.S. subprime real estate loans, made to borrowers with weak credit histories.

In late July, IKB abandoned a profit forecast for the 2007-2008 fiscal year of €280 million ($382 million). It said it had “felt the impact of the crisis in the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market,” and said its chief executive, Stefan Ortseifen, had resigned.

Germany’s bigger banks so far have reported only minimal exposure but we will have to see what the truth is, as more reports come in.

Wall Street investors left for Labor Day weekend pleased about the prospects of an interest rate cut, but they’re likely to come back wanting more evidence that rates are indeed about to come down.  Expect to see some termpered buying on Tuesday morning.

The market has been in better spirits, for the most part, over the past two weeks than in midsummer, when fears that lending troubles would freeze up credit sent stocks tumbling. Although the Fed has injected cash into the banking system and lowered the discount rate - the rate it charges commercial banks for loans - Wall Street’s fears haven’t been completely assuaged.  The Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor’s 500 finished slightly lower in a week where it plunged and later recovered. The Nasdaq finished the week higher.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has not come right out and declared that a rate cut will happen, but many investors believe he has telegraphed it by saying the central bank will “act as needed.” Traders who bet on the Fed’s next move are not only pricing in a 100 percent chance of a quarter-point rate cut at its next meeting on Sept. 18, but also are pricing in a 100 percent chance of similar move in October.

The Fed has not reduced the benchmark fed funds rate since 2003, when it declined from a low 1.25 percent to 1 percent. Starting in 2004, the central bank made gradual rate increases until the summer of 2006, when it began holding the benchmark rate at 5.25 percent - the highest it’s been since early 2001, but historically, fairly moderate.  Investors will be curious to see if the Bank of England and European Central Bank decide to lower rates Thursday. Rate cuts abroad could signal a similar move from the Fed.

Investors also want to know if the U.S. job market, which has been one of the more stable parts of the economy, is holding up. The Labor Department’s report comes out Friday. Economists surveyed by Thomson Financial predict that nonfarm payrolls rose in August, that the unemployment rate held steady at 4.6 percent, and that hourly earnings ticked up by 0.3 percent.

NBC Universal said Tuesday it will double the size of its cable operations outside the United States with the acquisition of Sparrowhawk Media, the private equity-backed owner of the Hallmark channel.

Sparrowhawk, with 18 channels, will be integrated into NBC’s global networks division, bolstering its channel offering to 30 and bringing in an additional 60 million subscribers.

A source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday that NBC was buying Sparrowhawk for around $350 million.  Terms of the transaction were not disclosed on Tuesday.

The relationship between Sparrowhawk and NBC goes back several years, starting with a licensing deal involving “Law and Order.” NBC is the biggest supplier of programming content to Sparrowhawk.

Hallmark’s international channels broadcast across 152 territories in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia. Its library of classic films includes “Moby Dick” and “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Hallmark UK, the largest channel in the group, carries NBC Universal series such as “Law & Order,” “House” and “Monk.”

NBC Universal is 80 percent owned by General Electric Co. (Charts, Fortune 500), with the rest owned by French media and telecoms group.  Not a suprise to industry insiders but a great move on NBC’s part.