Radio 4 sent me to New York to find out The Truth About Goldman Sachs. And I can exclusively reveal the shock answer: it is beige.

The New York-based investment bank (more on what that means later) has moved into a brand new Global Headquarters right by the square where the twin towers once stood. One of the world's most profitable ($13.4 billion after tax in 2009) and successful banks, it owns and designed the new building - though $200 million came from US taxpayers. But if you expect ostentation comparable to the triple, storey-high neon signs which once circulated the name Lehmann Brothers round that now bankrupt company's Times Square headquarters, you will be disappointed.

No name. No logo. Just the address, 200 West Street, cut out of the plain grey stone portico above its doors. At an almost intimidating distance across the large entrance lobby sit three identically clad receptionists. To their left droop the flags of the United States and New York. But on the acres of plain beige stone wall behind them there is nothing even to hint who might occupy 200 West Street. Nor anywhere in the vast triple height lobby clad in plain beige stone and floored with large square charcoal grey tiles. One insider told me that the décor, which is the same throughout, was 'tasteful but understated'. Then insisted in an understated but tasteful way that this revelation was off the record.

I travelled up to the 11th floor Sky Lobby, where more plain beige stone looked down on workers rushing with their lunch from the canteen back to their desks. This large interchange gives access to the upper floors so I headed for Floor 42 and Meeting Room J to wait for the Partner I would interview and admired the view over the Hudson River to Goldman's other 42 storey tower dominating the opposite shore. Finally I spotted the Goldman Sachs branding - a plain blue grey square with the name picked out in white. On a pencil. Left on the table should I wish to make notes and had forgotten my own. I didn't. I hadn't. But I kept the pencil.

And investment banks? They buy stuff. They sell stuff. Sometimes their own stuff. Sometimes for other people (but don't turn up unless you have at least $25 million). So why do so many hate Goldman Sachs with such a passion? And why has the US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (think the Financial Services Authority on steroids, with attitude, and armed) filed charges of securities fraud against the bank?

Is it because as well as buying and selling stuff Goldman Sachs also buys and sells bets on whether the stuff it buys and sells will go up or down in value? And buys and sells insurance against losing money on those bets. And places bets itself that stuff it sells to clients will go down when its clients hope it will go up. Is that it? Probably not. Goldman Sachs has always done that. And in any case it isn't gambling, the Partner tells me, it is allocating capital and, she insists, investment.

Or is it because almost half of its vast profits are divvied out among the staff? In the past fifteen percent of the fund - which in 2009 was $16.2 billion - has gone to the 400 or so partners (do the math, as they say here). Much of the rest goes to the 'revenue generators' (principally the ones who buy and sell all that stuff) and the balance to the 'Federation' of support and administrative staff.

It is this remuneration - which the bank prefers to call 'compensation' rather than 'pay' - which strikes at the heart of Middle America where average household income is $50,303 a year and falling. Each partner in the US got millions of dollars in 2009 on top of their $600,000 pay. And of course most people outside the banking world do not understand what that job is. Or what its purpose is.

That may not be the truth about Goldman Sachs. But is it a truth. And one it has yet to deal with.

Paul Lewis is presenter of Money Box, Money Box Live and The Truth About Goldman Sachs

• The Truth About Goldman Sachs is on Radio 4 tonight at 2000 and on the iPlayer for seven days.
• Edward Stourton profiled Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs on Radio 4's Profile in April.
• The picture shows the pencil Paul picked up in that Goldman conference room. There are more pictures here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n58kf

I ask because Money Box Live will be live from Glasgow on Wednesday October 14 as part of the BBC's Money Matters Roadshow. The programme will be taking questions live from an audience at the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre on savings, investments and pensions.

Last time we did this - in Manchester in February - I was really pleased to meet the people asking the questions, and dozens more around the show throughout the day, to talk money. Hundreds of people were helped throughout the day. The queues for advice on saving, investment, and pension planning were by far the longest. So this time we have decided to take those as our topics for Money Box Live.

I would like to hear in advance what you - Radio 4 blog readers - would like to ask about cash savings, investing a bit of money, or putting hard-earned wages into a pension. I can't promise we will answer your specific query. But I will make sure that the main subject areas you raise are covered one way or another. Click here to let me know.

The Money Matters Roadshow will be open all day from 8am to 6.30pm at the Buchanan Galleries. So if you happen to be in Glasgow on Wednesday 14 October why not come along for free money advice?

There will be 30 financial experts offering confidential help to all comers and you will see some of the BBC's top financial journalists. Plus you can join the audience and watch Money Box Live go out live - and see what we all look like! You might even get your question answered live on air.

Money Box Live from Glasgow is broadcast live on Wednesday 14 October at 3pm on Radio 4. And there will be an extra half hour of questions and answers published on our website later.

I would love to see you there!

Paul Lewis is presenter of Money Box and Money Box Live

• The picture is by Jason Rogers and is used under licence.

Pitot tubes. Until recently I had never heard of them. But as we headed from Calgary to Toronto on an Airbus I wondered if they were icing up as the outside temperature hit minus 40 - that low, C or F is the same.

Iced up pitot tubes feeding the wrong information to the onboard computer are the leading explanation for why the Airbus A330 on flight AF447 plunged into the Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Paris on 1 June. The false readings confused the computer which mishandled the plane and passed control to the humans. They could not save the aircraft so close to its tolerances in turbulent storms above the Equator. Airbus has now advised upgrading all pitot tubes even though it insists there was nothing wrong with them.

Until then I had taken comfort from the fact that modern jetliners are flown by computer. Even the pilots admit it. Two weeks earlier as we approached Toronto from London the First Officer talked us through the weather and the time at our destination, then added 'we will shortly begin our descent into Toronto in about, ooh, five minutes the computer says.' Relax, First Officer, we'll be down before the Captain has finished his Sudoku.

So I kept a look out for ice on the sharp bits of our Airbus 320-1 as we sped away from Canada's West.

Ah the West! We had said goodbye to the Rockies the day before, driving East on the trans-Canada Highway (two lanes and warnings of elk crossing though we saw none). We over-nighted in Calgary, a city of a million folk and, gosh, a hundred years old or more. It turned out to be a weird place with little to see - and less on Mondays as the Art Gallery is closed. But we stumbled upon a secret none of the guidebooks mentions. Calgary has the best restaurants and bars in Canada. We had struggled to find either so far. But Calgary's 8th Ave SW has a string of them.

Lunch was an Atlantic burger (a wonderful Canadian invention for us semi-veggies which wraps a bap round a North Atlantic salmon fillet) with chips to die for and a light Caesar salad in the Trib Steakhouse. The local house wine, carefully measured in ounces and served in very large glasses, was fruity and rich.

Then to the museum which filled half the afternoon. Not least because the official panels explaining the exhibits, which took us back through a hundred years of the West, were paralleled with alternatives from the point of view of the Aboriginal peoples (as the First Nations or Native Americans now want to be known). Reading them thoroughly was my expiation as a visitor from the nation which had stolen their country.

A short walk to the Bow River, the rapids and canyons we had marvelled at in the West now calmed into a placid highway for timber. Then two beers at the Barley Mill Eatery and Pub, converted from the Calgary Water Power Mill and the wooden office of the Eau Claire and Bow River Lumber Company. More walking and then the search for dinner took us back to 8th Ave SW where we happened on the Mango Shiva. The food was perhaps the best Indian food we had ever eaten and the thin, crisp, buttery Nan bread certainly so.

Why, I asked our server Sharyse, were there so many good bars and restaurants in Calgary? A pause. 'Our demographic is, well, we have a lot of drinkers.' Her voice went up at the end in the rising inflection that nowadays adds emphasis to a statement. And it sits on huge oil and gas reserves. 'It's a very wealthy Province' she added.

The flight from Calgary to Toronto was the day before the flight from Toronto back to London and counted as the journey home. So my thoughts were allowed at last to turn away from waterfalls and glaciers and lakes and mountains and the complete absence of bears to money and the day job. There was plenty of time. What was scheduled to be a three and a half hour flight began with nearly half that rolling round the tarmac at Calgary airport. Problems with the cabin lighting would have left the toilets dark and several soft resets by the crew failed to cure the problem. We went back to the pier and took on a maintenance engineer whose orange jacket brought the lights back to life.

The young man next to me with blond hair, frayed jeans and walking boots, who was already so late he would miss his connecting flight, cheered himself up by reading the death notices in the Calgary Herald. I spent the time absorbing the business sections of the newspapers and magazines. In the press there was a long debate over whether the regulation of financial services should be principles-based (treat customers fairly) or rules-based (do this, don't do that).

Canada is moving to the former just as the UK is moving away from it to the latter. A Ponzi fraud was revealed, smaller than Madoff (of course) but just as devastating for its hundred or so victims. Controversy raged over the disposal of the bankrupt telecoms company Nortel and who bid what for it, when and to whom.

Half way through the flight the near-bankrupt Air Canada, which charged a hefty fare for the flight, now made us pay again for less-edible-than-usual cold snacks. No-frills service at flag carrier prices. It could be a slogan.

I moved on to pages about the Canadian pension crisis. Salary-related schemes closing, some being dumped (with no protection scheme in place) and Canadians being accused of spending too much and saving too little for too long. I could have been home already. That was followed by an analysis of why fund managers in the large public sector schemes had made such big losses on the hundreds of billions of Canadian dollars entrusted to them. The three largest lost 19% or C$72 billion off their C$385 billion assets in the last year because their active managers prefer to put the money at risk in shares rather than keep it in safer bonds.

Defending this approach Jim Leech, the CEO of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan which lost C$20 billion, said 'The fact of the matter is we have to take on risk to meet our pension promise.' Oh Jim! If taking a risk guaranteed those extra returns you need so badly it wouldn't be a risk would it? The risk is you may lose another C$20 billion. Perhaps Toronto teacher Kelly Alles should be put in charge. 'A high return is great' she told Canadian Business 'but when it comes right down to it I'd rather have a guaranteed lower return'.

And before I knew it we were landing at Toronto. Another journey survived. Only six more hours on the flight to London to watch out for ice on those pitot tubes.

• Part three of Moneybox's Coping with Recession series is on air tomorrow at 1200.
• Subscribe to Paul Lewis's Moneybox newsletter.
• The picture, Calgary Suburban, is by Evan Leeson and is used under licence.