Bloomberg, picking up on heavy options trading, reports that takeover rumors are once again swirling around MEMC Electronic Materials. The story notes that current-month call options, giving investors the right to buy MEMC shares for $13 on or before Nov. 20,…

NuVox Inc., the last telecommunications company founded by prolific St. Louis entrepreneur Robert Brooks, agreed today to sell itself to Windstream Corp. of Little Rock, Ark. The purchase price is $643 million in cash, stock and assumed debt.

NuVox is what’s…

The New York Times, in an editorial this morning, is calling for the Justice Department to investigate alleged anticompetitive practices by Monsanto. The Times editorialists note the importance of technology in modern agriculture and then add:

Following a decade of unchecked…

Supervalu’s earnings release yesterday was full of bad news, including a revenue decline and a dividend cut, but it contained some good news for the Save-A-Lot division, which is based in suburban St. Louis. The reason the dividend is being…

An executive of First Bank Business Capital, which is part of First Banks of Clayton, Mo., took the stand today in the federal fraud trial of Sholom Rubashkin, the former head of kosher meat firm Agriprocessors Inc.

One disclosure: The bank…

Craig LaBarge earned $987,294 last year as chief executive of LaBarge Inc., the company disclosed in a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. His salary came to $550,700, a 3 percent increase over the previous fsical year, and he…

Allied Healthcare Products disclosed today that Chief Executive Earl Refsland got a 3 percent salary increase last year but, for the third year in a row, he and other executives got no annual bonuses. The company also won’t pay bonuses…

I feel better about the climate for startup businesses in Missouri after meeting Jim Spencer, president and founder of Newsy. He moved the company to Columbia, Mo., a year ago from the San Francisco Bay area, and has since increased…

Savvis Chief Executive Phil Koen started his PowerPoint presentation this morning with a picture not of a server farm or a network operations center, but an electric dynamo, circa 1900. His point: Back then, every factory had its own electricity…

You’d expect Wall Streeters to dominate a list of the most powerful women in finance, and US Banker’s list does include representatives of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. But it also features two women who toil in O’Fallon, Mo., at the technology…