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Byline: -- Staff and Wire Services

Preferred Bank names new CFO 

LOS ANGELES -- Preferred Bank, a Los Angeles-based independent commercial bank focusing on the Chinese-American market, announced Wednesday the appointment of Edward J. Czajka as chief financial officer.

Czajka assumed the CFO duties from Li Yu, who had been acting as interim CFO since March.

Czajka was previously CFO of Presidio Bank, a San Francisco-based bank currently in organization.

Preferred Bank conducts its business from its main office in Los Angeles and 10 branch offices in Alhambra, Century City, Chino Hills, Industry, Torrance, Arcadia, Irvine, Diamond Bar, Santa Monica and Valencia.

City National gets Independence

City National Corp. on Wednesday completed its acquisition of Independence Investment LLC, a 24-year-old investment firm that manages $8 billion of U.S. equities on behalf of institutional clients.

The parent company of City National Bank announced on March 24 its plans to acquire the investment manager from Manulife Financial Corp.

Terms were not disclosed, but City National expects the acquisition to be modestly accretive to earnings in 2006.

Independence, whose clients including corporate, public and Taft-Hartley pension plans as well as foundations and endowments, will be headed by its current president and Chief Executive Officer Mark Lapman.

The firm, which is headquartered in Boston, will become an affiliate of Convergent Capital Management LLC, the Chicago-based asset management holding company that City National acquired in 2003.

Earnings drop for 99 Cents stores

COMMERCE -- 99 Cents Only Stores on Wednesday reported diluted earnings per share of 9 cents on net income of $6.3 million for the quarter ended Dec. 31.

In the comparable year-ago period, the company recorded 12 cents per share on net income of $8.7 million.

For the nine months ended Dec. 31, the company reported diluted earnings per share of 18 cents on net income of $12.4 million, compared to 25 cents per share on net income of $17.6 million in the comparable period in 2004.

The company expects net income for the quarter ended March 31 to be 1 cent per share, similar to the year-ago quarter.

The one-price retailer operates 234 retail stores in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada, as well as a wholesale division called Bargain Wholesale.

Interest rates up, could rise again

WASHINGTON -- Worried about inflation, Federal Reserve policymakers at their May meeting considered raising a key interest rate by half a percentage point before opting for a quarter-point increase.

Chairman Ben Bernanke and his Fed colleagues also decided to leave the door open to additional rate increases ``in view of the risk that the outlook for inflation could worsen,'' according to minutes of the Fed's May 10 closed-door meeting released Wednesday.

Those minutes showed that Fed officials discussed a number of options -- ranging from leaving rates unchanged to boosting them by a half percentage point. Policymakers mulled these options as they weighed whether it was more likely that the economy would slow given the Fed's previous rate increases or whether soaring energy prices might touch off broader inflation. Then they approved the quarter-point increase, the 16th consecutive hike of its kind.

That unanimous decision boosted the federal funds rate to 5 percent, the highest level in 5 years. The Fed had started the campaign to tighten credit in June 2004.