You will never eat lunch in this town again

Through most of the pre and post-"big bang" period covered by Philip Augar's book, I worked in the City of London and witnessed many of the episodes he recounts. It is, therefore, extraordinary that I should find only infinitesimal discrepancies between his recall of events and mine.

Augar's determination to record for posterity a fascinating period in the long life of London's financial centre is admirable. Even more admirable is his courage in dealing with a subject - the foreign takeover of British-owned firms - still perhaps too sensitive for most of the key actors in this drama: people with whom the author, I assume, continues to interact socially, as I do.

Since he is a trained historian, I am intrigued that he chose to treat his subject in a journalistic, storytelling mode, rather than a more academic way. This is not a complaint: the story is compelling, fascinating and well told. I am onlycurious.

One motivation that may be excluded is any attempt by Augar to enhance his own persona and role. He is almost self-deprecating in describing his own part in this story. I am not surprised, however, to see one or two of his interviewees continuing to rewrite history, so that misjudgement and greed are always attributable to someone else, never to themselves.

As a storyteller, Augar is as serious as they come. The only truly humorous scene arises from a misunderstanding between a New York suitor of Schroders and the Schroders team. The American keeps asking whether the City team is hungry, meaning would they be interested in lunch, while the Londoners think he is trying to bully them into declaring just how hungry for business and profits they are. It is a good example of how embarrassing cultural colonisation can be at times.

Augar is extremely perceptive and able to sum up thousands of hours of shared frustration with just a few strokes of the pen. His research and command of a very complex chronology are outstanding, and his fairness to those generally perceived as illtreated such as Martin Owen or Tim Ferguson, is commendable. I, for one, applaud it as natural justice, dispensed at last through this book. Indeed, the author is perhaps more of a gentlemanly storyteller than an investigative journalist: in the situations with which he is not fully conversant, he opts for giving the benefit of the doubt rather than grilling the interviewee until it hurts and the full truth comes out.

The story has a pedagogic ending. In "Five ways to herd cats", Augar offers a positive prescription for how to make a success of an investment banking business by aligning ambitions with returns, ensuring the support of all stakeholders, building a common culture, compensating well and wisely and focusing on teamwork. And he finishes on a dire note of gloom for the also-ran firms that are succeeding with some difficulty in the bull market, "believing that they are building a brand with stakeholder loyalty while paying only lip-service to the principles of good management. These firms will be caught out when market conditions next get choppy. Falling revenues will expose inflated cost bases and losses will appear. Shareholders, staff and management will get discouraged, firms will unravel, and we will all promise to do better in the future. Here's to the next time." Amen.

Where I do not follow Augar is in his principal thesis. He maintains that the opening up of the London equity market, without any degree of temporary protectionism, doomed the supposedly under-capitalised, under-managed and fragmented British firms to their true destiny of being swallowed up by foreign competitors. He also vividly laments the lack of a British champion and the laissez-faire attitude of the government and of the Bank of England.

I was puzzled to read: "Again one has to ask: where was the government?" in the context of Warburg's directors opting for acquisition by Swiss Bank Corporation (here I must declare myself an interested party) rather than by NatWest, as Augar would have wished.

As an economist and a banker, I find these complaints horrifying. Furthermore, the behaviour of the Bank of England in all cases where I have direct knowledge, was superb and well above the standard that could have been offered by any other domestic regulator, including that of the United States. I do not think it is right to advocate even temporary protectionism for an industry that preaches the virtues and responsibilities of open competition to its clients. What happened, in my view happened because the US philosophy of investment banking as a holistic business - adopted also by a couple of fast-learning continental banks - was superior to the fragmented, product-driven philosophy, where many little chieftains go their own separate ways. Indeed, Augar accepts this intellectually as a success factor, but cannot fully bring himself to see the evolution as a healthy process of survival of the fittest.

Despite this lingering disagreement, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism is thoroughly enjoyable and I recommend it unreservedly to the thousands of people commuting to the City for their daily bread. The big money-earners in Wall Street should also read it to learn a bit more about London before being shipped over "hungry" to do business. So too should many others because it is a great social history as well as being fun to read, despite being terribly serious.

And for younger readers thinking of interviewing for a job in the City, here is a snippet of how things used to be: "Just before 3.00, a chap ambled in, clearly having enjoyed a good lunch, and asked me a few introductory questions... The next comment was, 'Well you seem like a decent type, we'll offer you a job.'... Did I really want to work for people who took decisions on the hoof, were late for meetings, drank heavily at lunch, kept no records?" Don't count on it being like this any longer!

Rudi Bogni is the former CEO, private banking, of UBS Ag, the largest Swiss bank.