Business Blog

Hancock Holding Company president and CEO Carl J. Chaney has been appointed to the board of directors for the New Orleans office of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, according to a morning news release. The three-year term is effective January 1. The board of directors will provide economic information from their region to the [...]

The 2012 Mississippi Business Journal Book of Lists is now available in digital format. Just visit msbusiness.com/lists and click on the 2012 BOL icon featured at the top of the page. Electronic copies can be downloaded for $250. Print versions will be available Monday at the same price. Fifty MBJ lists were published in BOL [...]

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour leaves office Jan. 10, he’ll return to the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm he founded in 1991 That’s according to a person with direct knowledge of the plan who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because Barbour’s plans were not yet public. The [...]

In an election year when politics dominated headlines, perhaps Chuck Jordan’s sweeping victory in the Greenville mayoral race topped them all. In a surprising landslide victory, banker-turned-politician Jordan took more than 64 percent of the vote to become Greenville’s next mayor. Not only was this his first political campaign, Jordan, a white, took 40 percent [...]

This is the second Christmas we have had our online video series MBJ-TV and we wanted to post links to some of our holiday-related videos this year. First off, Ridgeland CFA Nancy Anderson evaluates the 2011 Christmas retail season and how it could affect the economic outlook of 2012. Then we visit the Viking Cooking [...]

Any businesses out there looking for a creative Christmas card idea might want to follow Sheldon Laboratory Systems’ lead. The Crystal Springs-based company sends one of the most effective yet simple cards I’ve ever seen. Every year, Sheldon employees “commission” their children to craft Christmas-related artwork. The company then uses the artwork to design its [...]

The proposed mega-merger marriage between telecom giants AT&T and T-Mobile USA is over. Ma Bell’s hopes of returning to number one on the wireless carrier leaderboard were overturned yesterday after months of backroom bickering that spilled out onto front pages and blogs around the country. While approval of the bid was initially promising, the plans [...]

JACKSON — The Evans brothers were sentenced on Dec. 19 in U.S. District Court on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud in what is the largest known commercial real estate fraud scheme in Mississippi history. Charles Evans Jr., 57, received 20 years in prison, and Chris Evans, 53, got 14 years. [...]

The Governor’s Workforce Conference held earlier this month in Jackson offered plenty of success stories, particularly the recruitment of the new Toyota plant in Northeast Mississippi. However, there were also words of warning about the state meeting the needs of businesses with a competently trained workforce in the future. The state is already struggling to [...]

The strategy is to structure benefits consistent with a  policy that encourages workers to stay on the job until age 62 “All the cards are on the table face up.” So went the pronouncement of Gov. Haley Barbour last week in detailing a 40-page report that calls for saving over $100 million annually in taxpayer [...]