Business Blog

Office properties in Clinton, Ridgeland and downtown Jackson have made the short list among candidates to become the new home of the Mississippi Department of Finance. The two leading candidates going into the whittling of the candidate list Tuesday were Jackson’s Landmark Center and South Point Business Park in Clinton. Ergon Properties’s Diversified Technologies complex [...]

Deep Throat said it best in the 1970s classic thriller about the Watergate conspiracy: “Follow the money.” That’s what Stennis Institute development director Phil Hardwick does every year with dollars spent locally at Mississippi homegrown businesses. Instead of fighting traffic and crowds at big box retailers like Wal-Mart, Toys ‘R Us or the recently troubled [...]

  Mississippi’s government and business leaders won’t find any glad tidings for the New Year in Forbes magazine’s annual list of “Best States for Business.” The business magazine’s December issue ranks Mississippi 46th overall and puts the state dead last in the “Growth Prospects” category. By contrast, Forbes proclaimed Utah the top state for business [...]

The New York Stock Exchange remembered victims of Friday’s mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn. this morning with a moment of silence before the opening bell. Traders stood quietly as the floor remained inactive for about a minute. Twenty-six people were killed including twenty children between the ages of six and seven at Sandy Hook [...]

Tuesday is short list day in the competition among metro Jackson office properties to become the new home of the Mississippi Department of Finance. Meeting the early deadline for submitting Requests for Proposals for a long-term lease deal with the state were downtown Jackson’s Landmark Center and South Point Business Park in Clinton, both considered [...]

If you work in downtown Jackson and were wondering where the bullhorn was coming from during the Thursday lunch hour then please read on. Occupy Jackson, an informal affiliate of last year’s national Occupy Wall Street movement is back. The one-day demonstration amounted to five American citizens huddled outside Smith Park on the corner of [...]

  Drax Biomass International Inc. plans to build a 450,000 metric ton per year wood pellet production facility in Gloster, in southwest Mississippi’s Amite County. The facility, to be known as Amite BioEnergy, represents a substantial multi-million dollar investment by the company and will create 45 direct jobs, as well as additional indirect jobs during [...]

Te Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently graded the 19 largest national banks on five factors designed to gauge how well they are being run.   The results are startling, BankInvestmentConsultant.com reports.   Not a single bank met the OCC’s requirements for internal auditing, risk management or succession planning. Only two of the [...]

Gov. Phil Bryant has recommended a frugal, balanced budget to the Legislature, saying, “We must take a balanced approach and spend only the money we have.” Highlights of his recommendation include: >> $24 million in new spending to improve education outcomes; >> $8.5 million in new spending to expand and upgrade the Mississippi Highway Patrol; [...]

Remember the morning of the “Individual Mandate” fiasco back in July? News producers at CNN and Fox News certainly do. Now it’s time for them to wince anew. The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank and training center, has given the two news networks “error of the year” distinction for reports that the U.S. Supreme [...]