Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Everyone is beating up on those poor investment bankers, but not Rainy Day. We retain fond memories of 25 October last year when the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was presented at a gala dinner in the British Library in London. Sparkling conversation richochetted round the room, fine wine flowed, the grub was exquisite and Lakshmi Mittal, CEO of ArcelorMittal, delivered an elegant keynote speech. All was well with the world back then.

To be sure, there was a hair in the soup, so to speak. The Rainy Day pick for the prize did not win. In its wisdom, the distinguished jury decided against The Black Swan by that most erudite of quants, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and gave the gong and the dosh instead to William D Cohan for The Last Tycoons. Another dense tome about banking! How could it win? What we didn't know then, of course, was that Cohen's superb account of the rise and fall of Lazard Frères & Co was a morality tale for our times. In October last year, the natural order of things was that Wall Street investment banks moved trillions of dollars around the world, made billions in fees and paid their managers in the tens of millions. That was very much then.

Still, life goes on and The Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2008 prize will be presented on Tuesday, 14 October at The Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. According to the organizers: "The 2008 dinner moves to New York and the newly renovated Plaza is sure to provide a fitting setting for this prestigious gathering of business leaders and commentators and senior publishing executives." Aye. It surely will. But will Goldman Sachs be around three weeks from now? That's the question. Irwin Stelzer is optimistic: "When Lehman went under, its ratio of shaky loans to its own capital was 3.4 times. Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, saw hard times coming and cut its problem loans from 2.5 times its own money to a mere one times those funds. Management matters."