Business Blog

  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 [...]