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By Laura Price and Christine Jenkins

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — Empresa Distribuidora & Comercializadora Norte SA named Edgardo Volosin as chief executive officer, according to a filing to the Buenos Aires stock exchange.

Ricardo Torres will become the company’s new chairman Replica Watches, the statement said. The board accepted the resignation today of former chief executive and chairman Alejandro Macfarlane.

–Editor: Brendan Walsh

-0- Feb/16/2012 16:05 GMT

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Price in Buenos Aires at lprice3@bloomberg.net Christine Jenkins in New York at cjenkins28@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Papadopoulos at papadopoulos@bloomberg.net

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A SWEDISH hospital today defended its use of an advertisement targeting attractive emergency room nurses who are either "hip" or "TV hot".

"You will be motivated, professional, and have a sense of humour. And of course, you will be TV-series hot or a Soder hipster," the ad in the Metro newspaper reads. "Soder" refers to Sodermalm, a once working-class district of Stockholm that is now funky and bohemian.

"Throw in a nurse’s education and you are welcome to seek a summer job at Sodersjukhuset’s (Stockholm South General) emergency department," the ad continues.

The hospital’s nursing manager Jorgen Andersson told Swedish news website The Local that the ad was a tongue-in-cheek campaign to attract applicants, and he did not believe that it would put off less attractive qualified candidates.

"We think that people understand that it was written to catch people’s attention," he said.

Ms Andersson said that, contrary to the advertisement Replica Watches, looks did not matter.

"Of course, being good-looking is no requirement at all. We put out an ad looking for interest and we got a great response. We want a nurse who is qualified and good at their job, regardless of looks," he said.

Read more here.

By Patrick Clark and Laura Marcinek

(Updates with revenue figures, chief executive officer’s comment starting in the third paragraph.)

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Bancorp, the nation’s fifth- largest lender by deposits, reported a 39 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit, beating analysts’ estimates as costs linked to souring loans fell.

Net income attributable to the bank rose to $1.35 billion from $974 million in the year-earlier period, the bank said today in a statement. Earnings per share increased to 64 cents, excluding a 5-cent net gain linked to items including a litigation settlement, from 49 cents. The average estimate of 30 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg was for 63 cents.

Chief Executive Officer Richard Davis expanded the bank during the credit crisis to take market share and counter slow industry growth. The Minneapolis-based bank boosted commercial lending 16 percent from a year earlier, while reducing provisions for credit losses by 46 percent to $497 million.

“Credit quality continued to improve this quarter,” Davis, 53, said in the statement. “We expect that nonperforming assets will decline in the coming quarter as the economy slowly improves.”

Revenue increased 8.1 percent from a year earlier to $5.1 billion. Net charge-offs fell to $622 million from $669 million in the third quarter and $937 million in the year-earlier period. The company said it expects charge-offs will “be down modestly” in this year’s first three months.

Full-year profit climbed 47 percent to $4.87 billion Replica Watches, as revenue climbed 5.3 percent.

Federal Reserve Tests

The Federal Reserve told the nation’s 31 largest banks to test their loan portfolios against a deep recession to ensure they have enough capital to withstand losses. The Fed said it would approve dividend increases and other capital distributions for banks that demonstrate sufficient financial strength to operate in stressed markets.

“We expect to ‘pass’ the assessment, and we look forward to moving closer to our long-term goal of returning a majority of our earnings to shareholders,” Davis said in the statement. “Raising the dividend is a top priority.”

The firm joined Commerce Bancshares Inc. as the two lenders in the 24-company KBW Bank Index to climb in 2011, with U.S. Bancorp rising 0.3 percent. It has advanced 6.4 percent this month.

–Editors: Dan Reichl, David Scheer

To contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Clark in New York at pclark48@bloomberg.net; Laura Marcinek in New York at lmarcinek3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.

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By Liam Vaughan

(See {DAVOS <GO>} for more on the World Economic Forum.)

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — The technology-driven jump in trading volume has been of little discernible benefit to the real economy and must be more closely watched by regulators, policy makers said at a debate at the World Economic Forum.

Jean-Claude Trichet, former president of the European Central Bank, Adair Turner, chairman of the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority, and Guillermo Ortiz, ex-governor of Mexico’s central bank, told the debate today hosted by Bloomberg Television in Davos, Switzerland that high-frequency trading should be scrutinized as a source of systemic risk.

The three attendees of this week’s WEF in the mountain resort were debating regulators’ progress in taming risk in the financial system after years of crises. High-frequency trading, where firms use computer-driven algorithms to place hundreds of trades a second, now accounts for more than half of U.S. stock trading volume, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Before the crisis, there was a very strong belief within the economic profession that this was good Replica Watches,” Turner said of higher trading. “We know from the efficient-market hypothesis that the more markets you have, the more allocative efficiency there will be, the more risk will be shared, the better price discovery we will have. But once you’ve got a reasonably active, liquid market, is there any real value? I think it’s quite reasonable of us to ask searching questions in a way we didn’t before the crisis on whether this is limitlessly good.”

The European Union announced in October a plan to curb high-frequency trading following the so-called flash crash last May, during which the Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly lost almost 1,000 points.

‘Incredible Intellectual Exercise’

“It is an incredible intellectual exercise to try to catch up with these new tools that are permanently putting into question the wisdom of our own regulation,” Trichet said. “We have to be prepared for even more dramatic changes in the functioning of IT and therefore the functioning of markets.”

Trading volumes in foreign exchange and credit have exploded in recent years as improvements in technology enabled companies to place more trades more quickly in more asset classes, Turner said.

“The acid test here is to ask yourself whether new products and innovation is something that benefits directly or indirectly the real sector of the economy, the households,” said Ortiz. “Does it help to better allocate resources, does it help distribute risk better, or are we just talking about bets that are being taken in the financial sector and have nothing to do with the real economy?”

The debate participants, who also included Standard Chartered Plc Chief Executive Officer Peter Sands and Luxembourg Finance Minister Luc Frieden, disagreed over whether bank size makes a difference to their riskiness to the financial system. Sands said U.K. proposals risk splitting banks into entities similar in size to most that have failed over time.

“I’m comfortable if a hedge fund takes risk on behalf of his own investors and if they do well they do well, if they fail they fail,” said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis. “I’m less comfortable with using taxpayers’ money.”

–Editors: Keith Campbell, Steve Bailey.

To contact the reporter on this story: Liam Vaughan in London at lvaughan6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net

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By Kelly Bit

(Adds Yale’s returns for last fiscal year in 11th paragraph.)

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — David Swensen, who pioneered an investing style that helped endowments beat markets by using alternative assets such as private equity and real estate, said investors who don’t have access to top managers are best off using index products.

“There are two sensible approaches to investing — either 100 percent active or 100 percent passive,” Swensen, the chief investment officer of Yale University’s $19.4 billion endowment, said today at the John C. Bogle Legacy Forum hosted by Bloomberg Link.

Unless an investor has access to “incredibly high- qualified professionals,” they “should be 100 percent passive — that includes almost all individual investors and most institutional investors Replica Watches,” he said.

Most active mutual funds are more interested in collecting fees than in boosting returns for investors, Swensen said at the conference, which highlighted Bogle’s work in building up index investing as a low-cost alternative to traditional mutual funds. Yale, which is based in New Haven, Connecticut, returned more than 14 percent annually over the past 20 years, compared with the 13 percent increase at the world’s richest school, Harvard University.

Swensen said he was “happy” with Yale’s hedge-fund exposure, adding that the investments remain a necessary part of the university’s holdings given the “subdued or modest expectations” of stock-market returns.

‘A Huge Issue’

“High quality hedge-fund exposure that produces returns that are fundamentally independent of what’s going on in the markets can be a great addition to an institutional portfolio,” said Swensen, 58, who has headed Yale’s investments office since 1985.

Still, hedge funds’ traditional fees of 2 percent of assets and 20 percent of profits “are a huge issue,” Swensen said, and unmerited except for extraordinary performance.

“If you’re going to engage in the game where you’re charging enormous fees, you have to be in the top 5 percent to 10 percent to win on a risk-adjusted basis,” he said.

Swensen said he also takes issue with high-frequency traders, saying they take unfair advantage of traditional investors.

“I’ve always viewed high-frequency trading as a tax on the rest of us Replica watches,” Swensen said. “A bunch of smart people taking advantage of order-execution rules as opposed to doing something good for the market place.”

Yale’s endowment gained 22 percent in the fiscal year ended June 30, compared with a 21 percent increase for Harvard. Columbia University in New York was the best performer among the eight Ivy League schools last year with a 24 percent gain.

–With assistance from Christopher Condon in Boston. Editors: Steven Crabill, Christian Baumgaertel

To contact the reporter on this story: Kelly Bit in New York at kbit@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christian Baumgaertel at cbaumgaertel@bloomberg.net

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By Joe Brennan Replica watches

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — Royal Bank of Scotland Plc’s Irish unit is planning a “substantial reduction” of jobs in an announcement that will likely be made tomorrow, according to Larry Broderick, head of the Irish Bank Officials’ Association.

In an interview with Irish broadcaster RTE radio Replica Watches, he said he couldn’t speculate on reports that RBS’s Ulster Bank Ltd, based in Dublin, may eliminate 500 jobs. Ulster Bank is preparing its second round of job cuts in four years as part of an effort to save about 50 million euros, two people familiar with the plan said yesterday. RBS officials declined to comment yesterday.

Separately, the IBOA will be meeting Allied Irish Banks Plc in the coming weeks, where he said job cuts may be more than 2,000.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Brennan in Dublin at jbrennan29@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dara Doyle at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net

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