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Merrill Lynch said statements with prices for the securities would be posted Monday night, and could be viewed by clients with online access to statements.

UBS decided last week to price clients’ holdings of the securities at a discount to reflect clients’ inability to sell the securities due to failures in regularly scheduled auctions. Previously, clients, though unable to sell the securities, were told they were valued at par.

Merrill’s decision to continue pricing most of the securities at par could hold off an eruption of anger from clients who are already frustrated at being unable to sell their securities. But it carries the risk of being criticized for ignoring a common practice of discounting illiquid securities.

That’s roughly on a par with the Russian economy. More than double the market value of Exxon Mobil Corp. About nine times the combined wealth of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Yet $1 trillion is the amount of defaults and writedowns Americans will likely witness before they emerge at the far side of the bursting credit bubble, estimates Charles R. Morris in his shrewd primer, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” That calculation assumes an orderly unwinding, which he doesn’t expect.

“The sad truth,” he writes, “is that subprime is just the first big boulder in an avalanche of asset writedowns that will rattle on through much of 2008.”

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Fransisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google’s ‘federal government sales team’, that aims to expand the company’s reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag – like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info – top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.

“Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge,” Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. “They maintained it in a shared drive or Word document, but we’re encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit.”

The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.

Google’s search technology usually rates a website’s importance by measuring the number of other sites that link to it – a method that is more problematic in a ‘closed’ network used by a limited numbr of people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.

As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also provides services to other US public sector organisations, including the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Often, the contract is for something as simple as conducting earch within an organisation’s own database, but in the case of the Coast Guard, Google also provides a more advanced version of its satellite mapping tool Google Earth, which ships use to navigate more safely.

At the heart of the proposals, agreed on Wednesday by Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, and Alistair Darling, UK chancellor, is the creation of a body made up of senior Treasury and regulatory figures from London and Washington.

Mr Brown and Mr Bush will discuss greater UK-US co-operation in tackling the financial crisis when they meet at a Nato summit in Bucharest this week and a Washington summit next month.

Whitehall officials say the new UK-US working group, whose membership and terms of reference are being finalised, will seek to establish a common approach on how to respond to the crisis before next month’s meetings of the Group of Seven, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

However, officials say that, given the huge role that London and New York play in financial markets, the significance of the new body will go beyond that.

“We have both been seised of the fact that we need to do something to respond to the financial market turbulence, that we need to generate a shared agenda in the run-up to the spring meetings,” said a senior UK Treasury official.

According to UK Treasury officials, the new body will examine the role of the credit ratings agencies in evaluating risk, amid concerns that they did not fully appreciate the exposure of mortgage-based products to a fall in the housing market.

This could mean a lucrative new market for coal-producing states such as Wyoming, Kentucky, Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia. But advocates of liquefied coal face a counterattack from environmentalists in the debate over global warming and must prove that they can produce an ecologically friendly product with a low carbon footprint.

Air Force officials have been testing synthetic fuels based on coal or natural gas. They plan to certify the fleet of nearly 6,000 aircraft to fly on a 50-50 blend of synthetic fuel and traditional petroleum-based jet fuel by 2011.

Assistant Air Force Secretary Bill Anderson said the search for affordable, cleaner-burning alternative fuels was driven by economic and national-security concerns.

The Air Force wants to comply with President Bush’s mandate to end America’s dependence on foreign oil while escaping soaring fuel prices.

For the Air Force, which consumes more than half of all the fuel that the U.S. government uses, the cost of fueling fighters and transports is stratospheric. Every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Air Force $600 million, Anderson said.

Last year, the Air Force spent $5.8 billion to buy 2.6 billion gallons of fuel. In 2003, the service spent about half that — $2.9 billion — to buy slightly more fuel, nearly 3 billion gallons.

The synthetic fuel is developed from a technology known as the Fischer-Tropsch process, which can convert coal, natural gas or biomass into clean-burning fuel stripped of impurities such as mercury, sulfur and carbon dioxide.

Most of the flight tests have used natural gas, but Air Force officials think their long-term energy strategy lies in liquefied coal, because the fossil fuel is so abundant in the United States.

The U.S. has 27 percent of the world’s coal supply — 493 billion tons — and sometimes is referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of coal.”

Despite its availability, however, coal seldom has been seriously considered as an alternative energy source because converting it to liquid is so expensive. But liquid coal is getting a fresh look as crude-oil prices soar past $100 a barrel.

While coal-to-liquid advocates say that the conversion process will result in an ecologically clean product, many environmental groups and their supporters in Congress think expanding the use of coal will worsen carbon emissions and global warming.

“I think across the board there is going to be opposition from the environmental movement,” said John Topping, the president of the Climate Institute in Washington. “I’d say it’s going to be almost universal because of the climate concerns.”

The Air Force tentatively plans to lease underused property at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana for the construction of a coal-to-liquid fuel plant.

By partnering with private enterprise, Air Force officials hope to foster the development of subsequent plants, to create a full-fledged coal-to-liquid industry that could supply military and commercial aviation.

The Air Force’s efforts have energized supporters on Capitol Hill, where coal-state lawmakers are pushing legislative initiatives to help promote liquefied-coal development.

At least a dozen lawmakers are members of a Coal-to-Liquids Caucus, which was formed in March 2007 by Sens. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., and Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Obama, who’s running for president, now says that he won’t support liquefied coal unless it emits 20 percent less carbon than conventional fuels.

Corey Henry, a spokesman for the Coal-to-Liquids Coalition, a group of coal-industry companies and unions, credits the Air Force with accelerating the push to create a liquid-coal industry.

“The Air Force is way out front over everybody else,” he said. “They will likely be the first big customer.”

Another challenge that coal advocates face is the hefty cost and manufacturing logistics of converting the mineral to liquid.

A coal-to-liquid plant typically requires 300 to 700 acres, a rail spur for coal and fuel deliveries, and access to roads, water and power lines, an Air Force fact sheet says.

The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.

But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.

The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, last month pleaded publicly with neighbouring Vietnam, the second-largest exporter, to guarantee supplies. The two countries signed an agreement on Wednesday March 26th apparently to do just that. But the various escape clauses that Vietnam insisted upon suggest it was more of a face-saving measure than a firm pledge. Vietnam and India, another big rice exporter, have recently announced export restrictions to try to curb soaring food prices at home. This will make it tough for poor, rice-importing countries, in Africa as well as Asia, to secure supplies.

Until a few years ago, rising harvests were meeting the growth in rice demand caused by Asia’s success in cutting poverty and its booming population. However recent wobbles in rice production have reversed a long-term trend of falling prices. They have also left the world’s stockpiles at their lowest since the 1970s. The rising cost of food in general is now pushing millions back into the poverty from which they only recently escaped.

The Fed has been criticised for its rescue of Bear Stearns, which critics say has degenerated into a taxpayer gift to rich bankers.

A senior official at one of the Scandinavian central banks told The Daily Telegraph that Fed strategists had stepped up contacts to learn how Norway, Sweden and Finland managed their traumatic crisis from 1991 to 1993, which brought the region’s economy to its knees.

It is understood that Fed vice-chairman Don Kohn remains very concerned by the depth of the US crisis and is eyeing the Nordic approach for contingency options.

Scandinavia’s bank rescue proved successful and is now a model for central bankers, unlike Japan’s drawn-out response, where ailing banks were propped up in a half-public limbo for years.

Sheriff John Green said on Friday he would halt sales of foreclosed properties in April and would seek a court order extending a moratorium for an unspecified period.

His action follows a nonbinding resolution passed unanimously by the Philadelphia City Council on Thursday calling on Green to stop the sales to give borrowers more time to seek a settlement that would prevent them from losing their homes.

Philadelphia becomes the first U.S. city to halt foreclosure sales in the current crisis, although Cleveland and Baltimore are considering similar measures, said ACORN, an advocacy group for low-income families.

The group said 45,470 subprime foreclosures are expected in Pennsylvania between the third quarter of 2007 and the end of 2009.

Green, the sheriff of Philadelphia city and county, is trying to identify and track homeowners with weak credit histories who took out the loans with initially low repayments but who are no longer able to afford them because their rates have adjusted sharply higher.

Such loans are expected to lead to a flood of foreclosures throughout the United States this year, and have led to severe losses among financial firms trading in securities backed by the mortgages. ACORN estimates 2.2 million mortgage loans will go into foreclosure in 2008 due to the subprime crisis.