Speaking to a klatch of invited press, Google's leadership painted a typically rosy picture of the company's prospects amid a faltering economy and chaos on Wall Street. "The company has a very large amount of cash in very, very boring and secure investments," CEO Eric Schmidt assured everyone. Schmidt also promised that the search advertising deal with Yahoo was going forward on October 11th with or without approval from federal regulators (and all signs point to "without"). VP of North American advertising Tim Armstrong repeated the company's mantra that what's bad for traditional advertising is good for Google. None of which helped the price of GOOG, which is down over two dollars so far today and over $340 so far this year. (Photo by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

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