Given the credit turmoil Lehman Brothers faced in its fourth quarter, it seems rather churlish to point out the one-offs the US broker-dealer benefited from as it turned in a decent $886m of net income and a return on equity of 16.6 per cent.

There’s nothing “one-off” about Lehman’s risk management, though, to judge by the consistency on the writedowns. It looks as though the same hedging skills that contained the subprime carnage in the third quarter worked equally well in the fourth.