Dan St. Marie's  Instablog

In an interview with London's Sunday Times newspaper, Lloyd Blankfein also said he believed big profits and bonuses at banks were a sign that the world economy was recovering.

"We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose," he told the paper.

The dominant Wall Street bank posted third-quarter earnings of $3 billion and plans to hand out more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

Blankfein told the Sunday Times that the bank's compensation practices correlated with long-term performance.

"Others made no money and still paid large bonuses. Some are not around anymore. I wonder why?"

He added that he understood, however, that people were angry with bankers' actions: "I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer."

God's work aside, Goldman Sachs certainly has godlike abilities when it comes to trading.  Courtesy of Tylder Durden over at Zero Hedge:

The Goldman 10-Q is out, providing numerous interesting datapoints for those willing to scour through them. The key one: Goldman lost money on just one trading day in Q3, making money on all the other 64. As a reminder, even in Q2 Goldman lost money on two trading days. The statistical probability distribution of 1 out of 65 is something that not the SEC, but Richard Feynman should be looking into, as Goldman Sachs, after rewriting the lass of risk/return, is now set to redefine normal distributions and other Statistics 101 concepts.

And more courtesy of Zero Hedge:

When a firm's trading performance challenges not only all preconceptions of realistic trading, but also of statistical distributions, one can merely stand back and watch in awe. Attached is a graphic of what a rigged, backstopped and manipulated market is all about. The chart demonstrates Goldman's YTD trading track record: out of 194 trading days in 2009, the firm has made over $100 million on 116 occasions! This alone accounts for $11.6 billion in revenue (and is likely much more as Goldman could have easily had a $1 billion trading day in the rightmost bracket as it is open ended). Assuming midline averages for any given bucket and multiplying by the amount of days that the firm traded within these, Goldman Sachs has made $15 billion courtesy of the skewed and very highly improbable (but not impossible, thank you taxpayers and Ben Bernanke) chart.



 
Market manipulation via high frequency trading?  Nope, just another day at the Church of Goldman.