Business Blog

Remember Cadence, the little regional bank company in Starkville? It’s all grown up now after last year buying an Alabama regional banking company more than twice its size and continuing its growth spurt with Thursday’s Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ approval of the acquisition of Encore Banshares, a $1.6 billion Houston bank. Acquiring Encore is [...]

  Scammers are trying to pry bank account information from Mississippians by advising they need to provide account details to help correct problems with their Bancorp South cards, Attorney General Jim Hood warns. Victims may receive a call on either their home phone or cell phones alerting them “there is a problem with their Bancorp [...]

Once belittled as an insubstantial electronic scrapbook with narrow appeal, the 2-year-old website Pinterest is maturing into a marketing monster. Visits to the site have increased more than 4,000 percent in less than a year, vaulting it to the No. 3 spot in social-media popularity behind only Facebook and Twitter. Some big-name retailers are taking [...]

General Atomics’ Electromagnetic Systems (GA EMS) Group broke ground Wednesday on a $12 million expansion to its existing 127,000-square-foot facility in Shannon in Lee County. The expansion is expected to create 25 additional direct jobs over the next three years. From its Lee County location, General Atomics manufactures, assembles and tests Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems [...]

Ridgeland-based Texting Leader LLC and Jackson-based Pearl River Glass Studio Inc. both placed first in separate divisions of the Mississippi Technology Alliance’s (MTA) Fifth Annual Mississippi New Venture Challenge last Tuesday at the Jackson Convention Complex. The conference-style annual meeting gives start-ups an opportunity to make real pitches to an angel investor panel. Competing against [...]

  Commercial banks and savings institutions in the United States are on track to complete three years consecutive quarterly earnings increases, but their lending has dipped for the time in nearly a year. The financial institutions made a total profit of $35.3 billion in the first quarter, a $6.6 billion improvement from the $28.8 billion [...]

Even with the bad news this week that daily newspapers in New Orleans, Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville all will reduce their publications to three days a week, there was more good news out of the Warren Buffet camp. Buffett says his company is likely to buy more newspapers in the next few years, and Berkshire [...]

When construction began a couple of weeks ago on a $6.5 million cotton gin in Noxubee County, it may have signaled a change in Mississippi agriculture that experts have been pointing to nationally for more than a year. Bogue Chitto Gin Inc. was created by a group of 25 cotton farmers from Aliceville, Ala., and [...]

The explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population should be making consumer-products companies rich, but instead, it is leaving them confused. The U.S. Latino community, already a $1 trillion annual consumer market comprising 52 million people (out of a total U.S. population of 311 million), is on course to grow by another 50 percent in [...]

You’ve heard the term “creative economy,” right? Where entrepreneurs with some talent or skill use it to manufacture a unique product or service. I get to see a lot of that producing videos for MBJ-TV. I’ve included a few recent stories below. Just a few creatives growing their small businesses. No economic developers, no lobbyists- [...]