The mood of financial barons has improved to cautiously optimistic as the global credit crisis settles down. But their message is still austere. The era of easy money is over.

Prominent investors, venture capitalists and private equity managers delivered the warning to the annual summer energy services summit held in Edmonton. The capital market was loosening up, with investment in first-half 2009 already surpassing the entire year of 2008. But there was little indication of any imminent return to the flush times of freely-flowing cash that characterized the financial world in the earlier part of the decade. The summit drew keenly interested representatives of Alberta energy service and supply sector, wanting advice on how to access the much reduced amount of capital available to grow and develop their businesses.

Mid-year economic data releases provided reasons to wonder about the future and assurances by a variety of national and international financial leaders that recovery is at hand or just around the corner. Fred Hutchings, ShawCor Ltd. vice-president and general manager of acquisitions, recited some worrisome numbers as moderator of the summit’s finance panel.

The number of venture capital deals in Canada in 2008 was the lowest in 12 years and dropped by nearly $1 billion from 2007. According to statistics compiled by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, a huge factor in the drop from $2.1 billion invested in 2007 to the $1.3 billion last year was greatly reduced cross-border activity between Canada and the United States.

American venture capital funds and other foreign investors contributed only $371 million to deals in Canada during 2008 compared to $845 million the previous years. The share of American and other foreign funds in Canadian disbursements also dropped significantly, falling from 41 per cent to 28 per cent in 2008. That is, the trends were down for both investment flows into Canadian enterprise and returns back out to capital market participants.

These numbers were the money managers’ way of describing the pain felt by an industry as capital hungry as energy. It was a financial paint-by-numbers version of long lists of stalled or cancelled projects in the Alberta oil and natural gas sector.

Among the energy service and supply employers who are Edmonton and northern economic mainstays, attention was riveted on the folks that hold the purse strings. Although the summit is held amidst the festivities of an annual auto race, it became an occasion for serious talk about what money managers look at when they decide what company to invest in. On the top of the priority list for every type of financier was the issue of who occupies a company’s top shelf and what experience they bring to the table.

“We are looking at the people,” said Douglas Freel, vice president of oilfield services for ARC Financial, a senior Calgary-based private equity firm focused on the energy industry. “We are looking at who is on the management team, what is the quality of the people and what they have done in the past.”

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