IT IS supposed to be a cosy chat between friends, but the onstage conversation scheduled for February 18th between Hank Paulson and Jeffrey Immelt could turn into a fight to preserve the reputation of at least one of these corporate titans. Until a few days ago this event, to be held at a cultural centre in New York, looked like a classic example of the old pals' act—Mr Paulson, a former treasury secretary and boss of Goldman Sachs, having insisted on being interviewed about his new book by his friend, Mr Immelt, the boss of General Electric, rather than by a journalist. (In a similar event on February 9th Mr Paulson took soft-ball questions from another old chum, Warren Buffett.)

Now, assuming the event goes ahead at all, it could turn into a brawl. This is because of revelations by Mr Paulson in “On The Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System”, about discussions that he claims to have had with the boss of GE in the thick of the financial crisis in the autumn of 2008. GE and Mr Immelt dispute his account.

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On September 8th that year, a week before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and triggered the market meltdown, “Jeff Immelt called to tell me that his company was having problems selling commercial paper. This stunned me,” writes Mr Paulson. “If GE couldn't sell its paper, what did that mean for other US companies?” A week later, on the day of Lehman's bankruptcy, the book says Mr Immelt stopped by the then treasury secretary's office at 6pm, “following up on a phone call from the week before when, just after the takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he'd mentioned that GE was having problems in the commercial-paper market. His report had alarmed me then.”

On October 12th, says Mr Paulson's book, Mr Immelt voiced his support for a Treasury programme to guarantee bank debt that did not extend to GE, only to change his mind overnight, asking for the company to be included in the programme after all, because “I'm worried about my company and our ability to roll over paper in the face of this.”

This account of events is strongly disputed by GE. Even before the book came out the company was facing lawsuits from shareholders accusing it of giving misleading information during this period, when it had raised $15 billion by selling equity. Critics say that GE gave the impression that it was in good health and that the difficulties in selling commercial paper were triggered by Lehman's collapse. GE also suggested that it only got involved in the government's commercial-paper guarantee programme as a show of support for a scheme that would help other firms, not because it needed to. “GE's public disclosures were accurate and to suggest that they were misleading is wrong and irresponsible,” said the firm in a statement approved by its lawyers. Moreover, according to GE, Mr Immelt disputes Mr Paulson's account of their conversations on September 8th and 15th: he does not believe they discussed problems with GE's corporate paper.

Mr Paulson's description of his approach to memoir writing will be a godsend to GE's lawyers, should it ever come to that: “I have been blessed with a good memory,” he explains at the start of the book, “so I have almost never needed to take notes.”

Nonetheless, the lawyers leading the class-action suit on behalf of disgruntled GE shareholders certainly found encouragement in Mr Paulson's words. Don Langevoort, a professor of securities law at Georgetown University, was reported by ProPublica, an investigative website, as saying, “Assuming what's in the book is accurate, it offers new facts that any judge would have to take very seriously in deciding whether to allow a suit alleging a violation of securities law to go forward.” GE retorted, “We strongly disagree with Langevoort and this doesn't change anything in the lawsuit. GE's public disclosures were accurate.”

Mr Paulson's comments have also added to the worries of influential GE bears

Mr Paulson's comments have also added to the worries of influential GE bears, such as Charles Ortel of Newport Value Partners, an investment adviser. As long ago as August 2007 he was worried that all sorts of lousy investments were lurking in GE's opaque finance division, GE Capital, and that “a gathering storm of liabilities will swarm the parent company”. He now fears that, for all Mr Immelt's well-publicised efforts to clean house by reducing the amount of risk within GE Capital and reducing its reliance on short-term commercial paper, GE is one of the likeliest candidates to spring a nasty surprise on the global capital markets this year—one that might send the markets into another meltdown.

“Our delinquencies have stabilised,” said Mr Immelt on January 22nd, announcing a 19% year-on-year decline in GE's profits in the fourth quarter. “The world we are looking at has improved.” If only the same could be said for GE's share price, which has tumbled in the days since Mr Paulson's book was published, and (although it remains higher than its lows of last spring) is now more than 40% below what it was when the conversations between Mr Paulson and Mr Immelt took place in late 2008. Their forthcoming discussion, if it happens, will at least be in public and on the record. It ought to be interesting.