Edson Mitchell is usually credited with Deutsche Bank's rise up the debt-capital markets league tables over the past four years, and not without reason. He was brought in because of his earlier success in turning Merrill Lynch from an also-ran of the US bulge-bracket banks in the mid-1980s into the undisputed leader by 1994, and has turned Deutsche into a leading contender in just four years.
But when he left to join Deutsche in May 1995, one of the first people he called at his old firm was Grant Kvalheim, whom he hired to run debt-capital markets in North America for the German bank, and whom he has described as "one of the best capital markets people in the world".
Kvalheim was the first of the many from Merrill to quit and follow his former boss to Deutsche, resigning on the same day as Michael Phillip and Anshu Jain. Within...
