Harold Maass of The Week The Best of Today's Business

Dollar loses ground

The dollar sank to its lowest level against the euro since 2004 as fresh data on U.S. consumer prices eased inflation fears. Investors are betting that the Federal Reserve's next move will be to lower interest rates to give the slowing economy a boost, so they're shifting fixed-income assets to countries where interest rates are heading up. "No one wants to own the U.S. dollar at the moment," said Westpac Banking Corp. economist Jonathan Cavenagh. (Bloomberg) The British pound is now worth more than $2. The last time that happened, President Bush's father was running a losing campaign for the presidency against Bill Clinton. (AP in Yahoo! Finance)

Yahoo! slides

Yahoo! shares dropped sharply in after-hours trading after the Internet giant reported first-quarter profit that fell short of expectations. "There is not a whole lot to get excited about right now," said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown. Yahoo! stock had risen by 26 percent this year as the long-awaited launch of a new marketing platform -- dubbed Project Panama -- raised hopes that the company would start gaining ground on Internet-advertising leader Google. But Panama might not start lifting Yahoo!'s results until the second half of the year. (AP in Yahoo! Finance) Yahoo!'s news could weigh on tech stocks, but solid profit reports from IBM and Intel could give shares a lift. (Reuters) Yesterday's report of easing consumer-price inflation -- which lifted the Dow Jones industrials to a near-record close -- could also help the mood. (The New York Times, free registration required)

Selling small businesses on plastic

Credit card companies are launching an assault on the small-business market, which still does most of its spending by check. Small-business owners last year spent $4.9 trillion, but put only 5 percent of the purchases on credit and debit cards. Card companies are making inroads by offering cards with 5 percent rewards for spending on office supplies and gasoline. Visa's small-business card sales jumped by 32 percent to $103.5 billion in the 12 months that ended June 30. "This is just an enormous untapped market," said Ben Woolsey, director of marketing at CreditCards.com, "and that's why all major card issuers are scrambling to capture it." (Los Angeles Times, free registration required)

EPA moves to protect environment

The Environmental Protection Agency instructed its event-planning staff to consider a hotel's environmental policies before booking EPA business there. The EPA's travel budget of about $50 million a year -- much of it spent on conference space -- is only a small fraction of the $13.5 billion in federal travel spending, but the federal General Services Administration is changing it rules to promote the EPA list for all government meeting planners. Environmental groups generally welcomed the new rule, but some said it was too little too late and even a potential distraction. "Being green involves more than putting towels back on the rack," said Sierra Club director Daniel Becker. (The New York Times, free subscription required)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

Emergency response from Web 2.0

Virginia Tech administrators took two hours to warn students there was a killer on campus, says Lisa Lerer in Forbes.com. But Web 2.0 responded instantly. "Information flew through text messages, blog posts, Web sites, online videos, and social networking sites." The tragedy served as a "grim, real-time stress test" for these technologies, and they demonstrated how effective they can be at getting word out fast.

How to sink an anchor

Poor Katie Couric, says Jon Friedman in MarketWatch.com. CBS just doesn't understand that "a network can't 'brand' a news star, as if the individual was an automobile or a diet soda." CBS's "poorly conceived" marketing strategy sent Couric off on the wrong foot as she took over the network's flagship evening new program. Then, after declining ratings and a few small blotches, Couric read a plagiarized opinion piece in a Web feature, hitting the low point of her seven-month tenure. Like NBC and ABC, CBS should just "let the anchor's work speak for itself" instead of resorting to "pathetic" publicity stunts.

GOOD DAY FOR: Paying with cash, as the Texas attorney general filed suit against CVS for compromising its customers' privacy by throwing confidential records into the trash bin behind the pharmacy chain's store in Liberty, outside Houston. The records included active credit card and debit card numbers with expiration dates, according to the suit. (Reuters in CNBC.com)

BAD DAY FOR: Good intentions, as Stanford researchers reported that switching from gasoline to ethanol might actually raise ozone levels and increase smog in some areas. If all vehicles run on a largely ethanol blend by 2020, there could be 200 more smog-related deaths annually, mostly in Los Angeles and the Northeast. (AP in Yahoo! News)

NOTED: The world's oldest continuously operating family business -- Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi -- shut down last year. The company had been run under the founders' descendants since 578. Its downfall came after it borrowed heavily to invest in real estate in Japan's 1980s bubble economy, and social changes sparked a decline in Buddhist temple donations. (BusinessWeek.com)