Companies in the Sacramento region have long counted on government contracts to smooth out the gyrations of economic cycles. Local, state and federal governments had deep pockets and a seemingly unending appetite for goods and services.

Companies in the Sacramento region have long counted on government contracts to smooth out the gyrations of economic cycles. Local, state and federal governments had deep pockets and a seemingly unending appetite for goods and services.

Big banks have been drawing heat this year. Some is focused, such as the clamor over monthly debit card fees being proposed or tested by several national banks. Some is diffused, such as that from the apparently leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement and its nationwide imitators.

Yuba County’s infrastructure was crumbling and its budget bleeding red ink when officials came up with a catching solution to their energy problems.

Hedge funds are back. Worries about European debt crisis, war in the Middle East and the potential for rating agencies to downgrade America’s treasuries have rattled shareholders. But those fears haven’t held back investors from pouring record amounts of capital into the cowboy country of largely unregulated, nontransparent funds.

After a jarring sell-off and resulting glut, there’s just one word for today’s municipal bond market: precarious.

A Sacramento software startup has launched an iPhone application for runners that picks music to go with a workout and can add customized coaching instructions along with the beat. When users pay to download the coaching data, a donation goes to a nonprofit of the coach’s choice.

In the Capital Region and beyond, some customers are switching from large financial institutions to smaller community banks, partially in response to columnist Arianna Huffington’s December 2009 “Move your Money” campaign, which encouraged consumers to do just that.

Chris Huppe spent more than a dozen years working on better ways to use the green waste from his landscape maintenance company.

It should be the perfect prescription for an ailing housing market, but so far few buyers are taking it.

There’s a lot of legal hubbub in California surrounding Property-Assessed Clean Energy programs. Also known as PACE, the programs could be headed for troubled waters.