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If you thought the "SUV craze" was over, you’re wrong. Very wrong. Market share for SUVs in recent months is the largest it has ever been.

During the height of the so-called "SUV craze" in the late 1990s and early 2000s, about one in five vehicles sold in America was an SUV. Today, in an era of near $4 gasoline and heightened environmental awareness, nearly one in three vehicles sold is an SUV.

Far from becoming forgotten relics of our misguided past, SUVs have survived and prospered by adapting to changing consumer tastes.

A decade ago, SUV buyers climbed up into huge vehicles that were, essentially, heavily modified trucks designed to excel in off-road driving and for hauling heavy trailers. They got terrible fuel economy and, with their tendency to tip over, they were dangerous, as well.

Today, big truck-based vehicles make up a tiny sliver of the SUV market. Ninety percent of the SUVs sold are mid-sized or smaller and the vast majority have nothing to do with trucks. These are high-riding cars. Most are front-wheel-drive, or if they’re not, they’re all-wheel-drive.

Electronic stability control, now required by law on all vehicles, has greatly reduced rollover risk in SUVs. ESC systems can help prevent a vehicle from skidding or tipping over during abrupt maneuvers.

Many of these new SUVs get fuel economy that’s as good or better than passenger cars sold just a few years ago. General Motors’ (, Fortune 500) new Chevrolet Equinox SUV, for instance, gets better combined city and highway mileage than a 4-cylinder 2010 Honda Accord.

Finally, on-road handling and performance is actually a selling point for many of these new, smaller vehicles. That’s made possible by lighter weight construction, more sophisticated suspension systems, and some serious compromises. Any notion drivers of these vehicles may have of serious off-road use must be put aside.

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When Ford Motor Co (, Fortune 500). was creating its new Explorer SUV, the automaker decided to use a car-based design shared with the Taurus sedan rather than the truck-based engineering used in previous generations. Ford’s customer research showed that, despite the old Explorer’s vaunted off-road capabilities, very few Explorer owners ever ventured far from paved streets.

Once the new car-based design was introduced, Explorer sales nearly tripled, according to data from J.D. Power and Associates.

As the downsides of SUV ownership dwindle with improved fuel economy, ride quality and handling, more consumers are switching out minivans and cars, said Jeff Schuster, an industry analyst with the consulting firm LMC Automotive. The attraction, as it has always been, is that SUVs offer the cargo space and flexibility of minivans and wagons but with an added dash of excitement.

"It’s rejuvenated the image of the multi-purpose vehicle," he said.

The biggest growth, however, has been among small SUVs like the Ford Escape, Honda CR-V and the new Mazda CX-5.

"For all intents and purposes, we’re sold out," Mazda spokesman Jeremy Barnes said of the CX-5.

Overall marketshare for small SUVs has more than doubled over the past seven years, said Ford sales analyst Erich Merkle. Today, they represent 45% of all SUVs sold. One reason is just that there are so many more small SUVs to choose from.

Besides providing more options, that variety actually generates more interest from consumers, said Schuster. Buyers who would have never considered an SUV before are looking now because they’re confident they’ll find something they like.

Small and mid-sized SUVs are attracting both the older and younger buyers for different reasons.

Older buyers are trading down into smaller SUVs as their kids leave home and they no longer need the space the larger vehicles offered, said Schuster.

Also, older drivers like having vehicles that they can get in and out of easily, said Merkle. SUVs, with their high seating, are easier to gracefully enter and exit than ordinary cars with seats down near ground level.

Younger buyers like the new smaller SUVs’ cool looks and the fact they’re clearly distinct from anything Mom and Dad ever drove.

"Nobody wants to drive what their parents drove," said Mazda’s Barnes. 

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Shoppers in Latin America, the Asia Pacific and the Middle East powered a 25 percent increase in MasterCard’s profit for the first three months of the year.

The Purchase, N.Y.-based payments processor reported income of $682 million Wednesday, or $5.36 per share, on revenue of $1.8 billion. That exceeded Wall Street’s expectations of $5.29 per share on revenue of $1.73 billion.

Ajay Banga, MasterCard’s chief executive officer, said the amount of purchases the company processed jumped 29 percent, the highest growth rate since the company went public.

MasterCard usage in the U.S. grew 14 percent as people spent more in restaurants and on apparel, hardware and electronics. Ajay Banga, MasterCard’s chief executive officer, told analysts on a conference call that the U.S. economy would have to do better for that growth to continue.

“For this trend to continue for a sustained period of time, we’re going to look for additional improvement in unemployment and a positive turn in housing prices,” Banga said.

In the last couple of years, MasterCard Inc. has focused on expanding its international business by acquiring an international card processing system called DataCash and a global prepaid travel card manager called Access Prepaid Worldwide.

Both of those acquisitions have paid off in the quarter, contributing to 25 percent profit growth, said Banga.

In the Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, usage of its cards grew 23 percent.

During the first quarter of 2012, MasterCard repurchased 652,500 shares at a cost of approximately $248 million. The company said it is authorized to repurchase another $556 million worth of stock.

MasterCard increased rebates and incentives, a common practice in the industry where processors offer banks and other issuers breaks to persuade them to switch the logos on the cards they offer their customers.

In the quarter costs related to such incentives grew 24 percent, taking a bite out of the company’s revenue. Analysts don’t like to see too much of an increase in these costs because it weakens results.

MasterCard’s stock fell 2 percent to $446 in early trading.

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A Japanese utility sought government approval Monday to restart two nuclear reactors even though some key upgrades to prevent another nuclear crisis will take three years.

All but one of Japan’s 54 reactors are offline for regular safety checks, and the last will be shut down in May. Residents fear another disaster like the Fukushima crisis, but Japan faces a severe power shortage if reactors are not restarted.

The government issued new safety guidelines to address residents’ worries, but it gave no deadline for when the improvements must be finished. Utility officials say the full upgrades will take three years.

Kansai Electric Power Co. submitted its safety plans for two reactors in Fukui prefecture, and the government’s final decision on whether to restart the reactors is reportedly expected later this week.

“We’ll aim to achieve the world’s top-class safety at our plants,” said Kansai Electric President Makoto Yagi as he handed the safety improvement roadmap to Economy and Industry Minister Yukio Edano.

However, more than one third of the necessary upgrades on the list are still incomplete, utility officials said.

Filtered vents that could substantially reduce radiation leaks in case of an accident threatening an explosion, a radiation-free crisis management building, and fences to block debris washed up by a tsunami won’t be ready until 2015 faxless pay day loans. This means the plant, as well as plant workers and residents won’t be fully protected from radiation leaks if a Fukushima-class accident occurs while the measures are being taken.

Currently, the crisis management headquarters at the Ohi plant is in the basement. The plant is relocating the function to a room next to the control room for the two reactors. None of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are equipped with filtered vents, although their operators are moving to install them in coming years.

“The operators are expected to take initiative to improve safety and reliability, and never dwell on the safety myth,” Edano told Yagi, urging the utility to expedite the process.

The startup guidelines are based on recommendations adopted last month by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. The most crucial measures to secure cooling functions and prevent meltdowns as in Fukushima were incorporated in the government’s guidelines, but the rest were not.

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For the stock market, it was a triumphant first quarter. But for earnings growth, the past three months were just ho-hum.

Analysts are expecting earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index to decline 0.1 percent compared to a year ago, according to FactSet. It’s a tiny number but a significant turning point. Earnings growth was on a winning streak for the previous nine quarters. Year-over-year earnings growth has been at least 10 percent for all but the most recent period, when it was 6 percent.

The reasons for the expected slowdown range from global (a weak Europe hurts everybody) to mathematical (it’s hard to top double-digit quarters). Whatever the cause, the stagnation in earnings growth is a stark reminder that the economy’s problems are far from solved. Just three months ago, analysts were predicting 3 percent earnings growth for the first quarter.

We’ll soon see if the expectations are on target. Earnings season gets under way Tuesday when the aluminum producer Alcoa becomes the first major U.S. company to release its first-quarter results.

Should this batch of earnings contain a lot of bad surprises, it could upend a stock market rally that pushed the S&P 500 index up 12 percent in the first three months of the year.

Here’s what you need to know:

_Are earnings really that bad?

It depends on how you look at it. People are blaming the slowdown on several factors including higher oil prices and Europe’s debt crisis. Those are legitimate concerns. High prices for oil and gas make it more expensive for companies to ship their products and leave people with less money to spend on other things. Europe’s debt crisis means that the U.S. can’t sell as many products there. It also hurts fast-growing economies like China and India that export to Europe. That, in turn, affects U.S. companies that count on growth in emerging markets to boost their own sales.

Keep in mind that this deceleration follows an extended period of big gains. Earnings surged 19 percent in the first quarter of 2011, and that was on top of 53 percent growth the year before as companies bounced back from a dismal first quarter of 2009. Aggregate earnings of companies in the S&P 500 were $96 per share last year, a record, according to FactSet senior earnings analyst John Butters. Investors realize that companies can’t sustain warp speed indefinitely.

“It’s supposed to be a very weak quarter,” says Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ, “but Wall Street is not freaking out because they understand why.”

_Does the market care about earnings?

Sure, to an extent. More often than not, a company’s stock moves in the same direction as its earnings.

Investors tend to trade on what they expect to happen in the coming months. By the time a company actually announces its quarterly results, chances are they’ve already been baked into the stock price and won’t have much of an immediate effect unless there’s a big surprise. A company’s predictions about the future are what investors really listen to.

“A lot of what we’re going to get now,” Butters says, “is already in the rear-view mirror.”

Butters also notes the outsized impact of Apple’s earnings on the overall figure for the S&P 500. Strip out Apple, Butters says, and the prediction for the first quarter falls from minus 0.1 percent to minus 1.6 percent.

Besides, one quarter of earnings growth hardly means a company is solid. Earnings can be a deceptive measurement, and will rise even when revenue falls if a company slashes jobs and other expenses. Share buybacks and accounting charges can also inflate profits and mask a company’s struggles.

“You can always juggle earnings,” says Stovall. “It’s a lot harder to fudge sales.”

_What’s the big picture?

Despite all the hubbub about The End of Earnings Growth, analysts are expecting only a short-term decline. Earnings growth is expected to return to 7 percent in the second quarter and 5 percent in the third quarter, according to FactSet. Bigger jumps of 16 percent, 14 percent and 13 percent are predicted for the three quarters after that, through the middle of 2013. Analysts also expect per-share earnings in the S&P to rise to more than $105 in 2012, another record, according to Butters.

That reflects investors’ belief that Europe will stabilize by the end of the year. Even if it doesn’t, the thinking goes, companies will have adjusted to turmoil in Europe as a new normal that they can function under, rather than something that sets off constant fears of another cataclysm.

Machinery company Caterpillar said in its last earnings call that the company expects its sales in Europe to continue to rise despite the problems there.

“It’s been going on a long time and hasn’t tanked the place yet,” said chief financial officer Edward Rapp. “We don’t think it will.”

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Did you ever wonder how people in Japan connect to websites hosted in San Francisco? Or how a New Yorker can Skype with a friend in Sydney?

It sounds crazy, but Earth’s continents are physically linked to one another through a vast network of subsea, fiber-optic cables that circumnavigate the globe. Cords no thicker than your home’s broadband connection stretch along the bottom of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; through the Suez canal; across the Mediterranean Sea and around the coasts of Africa and South America.

Indian telecom giant Tata, one of the world’s largest subsea cable providers, manages 130,500 miles of fiber sitting at the bottom of the ocean floor. That’s enough to circle the planet five times. It takes a ship six weeks just to load the cable for a cross-ocean voyage.

Why is all that underwater cable necessary? It’s a matter of speed, and laying in enough safeguards to ensure that the Internet won’t suddenly go down.

Subsea fiber-optic cables can tie two giant centers of commerce together, reducing data traffic delays. Three companies are in the process of building cable networks that link London directly to Tokyo — through the polar ice cap — with cables capable of 10 gigabit-per-second speeds. (That’s 2,000 times faster than your home Internet connection).

Those cables could reduce the Internet’s latency by about 60 milliseconds between those two points.

That’s an imperceptible lag for the average Internet user, but it’s an eternity for high-speed stock traders. They can make or lose millions of dollars in that span of time.

It’s not just financial institutions, which make up a very small portion of total Internet usage, that are interested in faster speeds. Internet service providers like Comcast (, Fortune 500) and Time Warner Cable (, Fortune 500) like to go zoom as well, because it gives them capacity to meet the growing demands on their networks.

Subsea cables have the added benefit of being shielded from wind, trees, storms and other destructive forces. They don’t require massive towers to carry them, like over-the-land cables do.

They’re literally just laid on the bottom of the sea, and once placed there, they can more or less be left untouched for a quarter century.

But sometimes cables get cut, particularly in shallow water. They get accidentally clipped by ship anchors about twice a year.

It happened most recently a month ago, when a ship dropped anchor off the coast of Kenya and cut Internet service for much of the country. Google noticed a steep drop in availability of its services in Kenya on Feb. 25.

That’s why cables are outfitted with GPS, so ships can find and patch them when they break. There are outsourced companies on the clock 24/7 to do repairs at a moment’s notice.

Having multiple cables connecting continents from many different locations means the Internet is less likely to be massively disrupted when a cable is snapped.

That’s why Tata says it was critical to build the final leg in the world’s first round-the-planet network, which it completed last week. The final cable connects Mumbai to Marseille, France. Tata’s other links tie the United Kingdom to New Jersey, Spain to Africa and Japan to Australia.

Together, those pipes handle 25% of the world’s Internet traffic. Tata wouldn’t put a price tag on the project, but an under-construction arctic cable linking Asia, North America and Europe has an estimated cost of $1.5 billion.

The upshot of all that investment is that if one cable snaps, you’ll still be able to play "Words with Friends" with a partner 10,000 miles away.  

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The number of first-time filers for unemployment benefits fell to a four-year low last week, hinting that solid job growth likely continued in March.

About 348,000 people filed for initial jobless claims in the week ended March 17, down from the previous week’s 353,000 claims, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

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Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had predicted the newly unemployed would file 355,000 claims payday loans for bad credit.

Unemployment claims are considered a key indicator of the job market’s strength, and recently they have fallen back to levels consistent with a healthier labor market.

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Even when the economy was stronger in 2005 and 2006, it was not uncommon to see Americans file around 350,000 new claims a week, due to usual turnover.

Employers have now added more than 200,000 jobs each month since December, and a decline in unemployment claims suggests job growth may have continued at that pace in March, said Jennifer Lee, senior economist with BMO Capital Markets.

Since the initial claims number can be volatile from week to week, economists often look to the four-week moving average as a broader gauge of the labor market’s health. Lately, that figure has also been on a gradual decline.

Meanwhile, continuing claims fell. About 3.35 million people filed for their second week of unemployment benefits or more in the week ended March 3, the most recent data available. That’s down 9,000 from the previous week.  

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Emerson said today it has purchased Avtron Loadbank, a Cleveland-based firm that makes testing equipment for standby power generators.

Avtron will become part of the Ferguson-based manufacturer’s Network Power division, which has seen its data center business grow in recent years. The company, which has about 200 employees and three factories in the U.S. and U.K., makes equipment that tests the emergency power supplies that keep data centers up and running if normal power fails.

“The acquisition is a perfect fit with our existing services network, expanding the touch points we’re able to provide data center managers,” said Armand Visioli, president of the Emerson division that Avtron will join.

Avtron Load Bank is a division of Avtron Holdings, LLC, which is owned by Morgenthaler Private Equity. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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