Slurp – the great vampire squid strikes again! That now-infamous description of Goldman Sachs (in Rolling Stone magazine) is a tad hysterical. But it takes some sucking power to extract $3.4bn of quarterly net income within a year of a full-throated banking crisis. With Goldman’s shares close to levels before Lehman Brothers collapsed, you’d be forgiven for wondering if 2008 ever happened.

Do not be deceived. Beneath Goldman’s gleaming mantle is a cephalopod swimming with one powerful arm. Trading in fixed income, currency and commodities generated half the bank’s record net revenues, almost tripling from last year’s second quarter. This client-driven trading is part of Goldman’s DNA but cannot last. Trading margins remained at the historically wide levels of the first quarter (helped by competitors’ demise), while a broad-based recovery in markets induced clients to resume trading. Meanwhile, another stand-out area – underwriting equity and debt sales within the investment bank – owed much to capital raisings by beleaguered peers.