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Today's tale is of two companies and the importance in an economic downturn of a strong balance sheet. In one corner is Rolls-Royce, which has spent the better part of £10 billion since 2001 on research and development, capital expenditure and so on, but is still sitting on £1.5 billion of net cash.
In the other is Rio Tinto, which today announced that it is raising $19.5 billion (£13.6 billion) from Chinalco, the Chinese state-owned aluminium producer, partly in convertible bonds but more controversially by giving it a slice of some of its choice assets. Where would you rather be?
Rio Tinto is working hard to convince the world this was not a fire sale, but it is hard to see why it would be anything else. The company fell prey to the honeyed words of investment bankers in the good times, and was tempted by them to blow its financial security on a top-of-the-market seriously overpriced acquisition of Alcan - a deal that has turned out to be the mining equivalent of the RBS purchase of ABN Amro, given it was done on the assumption that metals prices would carry on upwards, only to find they in fact began to fall precipitously very soon after it was completed.
With prices lower still and demand plummeting, Rio has found itself crippled by a debt burden that is too big to be eliminated by a rights issue. So the test of today's sale is not whether the price extracted from the Chinese can be made to sound reasonable - and I defy anyone outside the company to know enough about the assets to make such a judgment - but whether Rio would have considered such a deal at all were it not on the financial rack. Selling stakes in key mines to customers when strapped for cash cannot have been part of its five-year plan.
Rolls-Royce was terribly dull in comparison. Chief executive Sir John Rose reckoned life was going to get tougher, so the company moved early to cut costs, taking out 10% of its overhead staff, or 2500 jobs.
It batted off pressure from investors to launch a share buyback, it pushed its marine, energy and defence businesses to offset some of the slack it anticipated would come in civil aviation.
Today's 10% increase in profits, 17% gain in sales, and 21% rise in the order book was the result.
The legacy is a balance sheet strength that will see it through the several years of slowdown that are ahead , and still give it the firepower to chase new opportunities, as for example in civil nuclear.
If anyone wants a role model on how to manage and move forward in a downturn, it is pretty obvious which of these giants they should choose.
Crosby's ousting makes no sense
So goodbye Sir James Crosby, goodbye to one of those few people who has been at the top of a financial institution, and who was also prepared to take on a role in public service as deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority.
Is the quality of regulation going to be improved by forcing him out? Unlikely. Are similarly knowledgeable people going to queue up to take his place? Even more unlikely.
At a time when we desperately need regulators and policymakers who understand the banking system, does it make sense to oust him? I can't see that it does.
The speed with which he went tells you a lot about the world in which we live. A risk manager's warnings were allegedly ignored by him when he was running HBOS , the risk manager was made redundant and the bank subsequently hit the buffers.
This was revealed by the Treasury Select Committee yesterday, and it was immediately seized upon by the Conservatives as a stick with which to beat Gordon Brown — because the Prime Minister was linked to Crosby through a report that the latter did on mortgage finance, and through using him for advice on various aspects of the banking crisis.
Within 24 hours of becoming a political football, Crosby had resigned from the FSA, with Tory shrieks ringing in his ears that his appointment cast doubt on Gordon Brown's judgment.
It was a ludicrous assertion — although typical of the name-calling that passes for so much political debate these days — but Crosby did not bother to stay and fight, and who can blame him?
There was no attempt to get his side of the story; no attempt to be proportionate, no thought by the Tories of the damage that forcing him out might do to an already-fragile system. The FSA last night published a detailed statement that implied there was no case to answer, but by then he was gone.
We have become used to the fact that today's politicians haven't got a clue about the real world because they have spent so much of their lives in Westminster.
But if they insist on publicly humiliating and then ousting every outsider as part of their political games, they will soon find they have no one outside willing to assist them.
People like Crosby volunteer for public service, not public sacrifice.
