Business Blog

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s early March concession that the banking executives who contributed to the nation’s banking collapse are “to big to jail” has brought protests from around the country. Holder, in March 6 testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, said going after leaders of the big banks for illegal activity related to the [...]

Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee has rejected expansion of Medicaid in his state over impatience with the Obama administration’s for approval of his proposal to let the state use the money to buy private insurance for the working poor who wold otherwise be covered by Medicaid expansion. In turning down Medicaid expansion, Haslam called for [...]

Customers of Mississippi restaurants will now know whether the catfish on their table is domestically produced or is an imported variety of catfish-like pangasius, also sold as basa, tra and swai. Mississippi producers persuaded legislators this month to amend the state’s catfish Country of Origin Labeling law to require restaurants to also identify the origin [...]

  With a 20-year-lease offer of $48.5 million on the table, downtown Jackson’s Landmark Center held a clear lead in the competition to become the new headquarters of the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Rivals South Pointe Business Park in Clinton and Diversified Technologies complex in Ridgeland presented offers of $51.4 million and $53.4 million, respectively. [...]

Aggressive last-minute price cutting did the trick for Clinton’s South Pointe Business Park in the competition to become the new home of the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the state says. The selection came down to price, with representatives of the former WorldCom headquarters presenting a lease offer too attractive to pass up, said Kevin Upchurch, [...]

Ties to military operations have exempted Golden Triangle Regional Airport near Columbus and Key Field in Meridian from closing under a funding cutoff set to begin April 7 under the federal budget sequester. Five other “contract towers” in the state — Tupelo, Greenville, Oliver Branch, Jackson, and Bay St. Louis – failed to gain exemptions [...]

Legislation supporters say would save Mississippi $5 million a year on office leasing costs and whittle the space state workers occupy to levels consistent with federal standards died earlier this month. The bill authored by Sen. David Blount and backed by a Millsaps College analysis easily passed the Senate but failed to make it onto [...]

The White House is encouraging skeptical state officials to expand Medicaid by subsidizing the purchase of private insurance for low-income people, even though that approach might be somewhat more expensive, federal and state officials say. Ohio and Arkansas are negotiating with the Obama administration over plans to use federal Medicaid money to pay premiums for [...]

Air travelers accustomed to catching Silver Airways flights out of Hattiesburg, Meridian, Greenville and Tupelo may soon have to rethink their travel plans. As with a series of other disruptions occurring at airports large and small around the country, the culprit is the federal budget sequester, a series of across-the-board cuts brought about by the [...]

The healthiest Mississippians live in Desoto County and the least healthiest in the Delta’s Quitman County. Those are among the conclusions in the fourth annual County Health Rankings released Wednesday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The County Health Rankings rank the overall health of nearly every [...]