Bankers are a competitive bunch, though competing to give money away seems an unusual form of behaviour.
But the charity Save the Children has benefited enormously in the past two years from a strange expression of bankerly machismo. The lesson of the last two ifr annual awards gala dinners is that if you dress 1,300 bankers in black tie, stick them in a ballroom, feed them a good dinner, let an acerbic comic insult them, and ply them with enough drink, they will be dead keen to throw away more money than the next guy.
The ifr awards dinner has quickly grown into something of a market institution, the bankers' version of the Oscars. The 1997 dinner had been particularly memorable for two reasons: compere Clive Anderson's quip when giving out the award for borrower of the year: "surely that's Fergie," and a frenzied outbreak of competitive giving when several big firms led by Morgan Stanley ganged up on the 1997 bank of the year, Goldman Sachs, by offering to donate substantial sums £20,000 ($33,000) or more if Goldman matched them. It did. The 1997 dinner raised £325,000, compared to £30,000 in 1996.