After a lot of talking, ABN Amro and Barclays have announced a deal--worth more than $90 billion--that is anything but done. To make the deal work, ABN Amro and Barclays also inked a separate deal to sell LaSalle Bank, part of the ABN empire, to Bank of America for about $21 billion. The door is still open to the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is scheduled to meet soon with ABN representatives. For Bank of America, LaSalle--and its 400 branches in the Midwest--is a strategic buy that one would guess will put them even closer to the Federal deposit share limit. It will really boost BofA's Midwest coverage. In Chicago, it would leap past JPMorgan Chase.

For more:
- here's a New York Times article