Late last year, one of ABN Amro's senior North American managers likened the bank's involvement in the investment-grade US credit markets to "a kind of store-front on Madison Avenue".
Competing with the most fashionable US high-grade bond underwriting houses, however, appears to have become too extravagant a pastime for the Dutch bank.
In June ABN ceded control of its entire US domestic debt capital markets underwriting business to its wholly owned but fiercely autonomous midwest bank, LaSalle.
The move comes as no surprise, considering ABN is sixteenth in the high-grade corporate bond underwriting...
