Retrenchment

How hard has Argentina and the telecom collapse hit the American banking community? FleetBoston Financial Corp, the nation's seventh-largest bank, today announced that it was selling its investment banking division, Robertson Stephens, and cutting its venture capital portfolio by 30 percent. And that was the appetizer. WSJ.com (subscription required) has the story. Here's the main course:

"As part of a broad retrenchment amid sagging profits, (FleetBoston) also plans to scale back and consider selling all or part of its extensive operations in Latin America, sell its big student-loan servicing business, and exit most of its Asia operations, these people said. Chief Executive Charles K. Gifford made the announcements at the annual meeting in Boston Tuesday, confirming an article in Tuesday morning's Wall Street Journal."

Yikes.