“Move along please – nothing to see here.” Like the other US banks that reported first-quarter earnings this week, Citigroup was desperate to appear as healthy as possible ahead of the Treasury’s stress test results, which are now just weeks away. “Look Mr Geithner, revenues have doubled since a year ago to $25bn, back to the peak levels of 2007. And after five quarters of red ink, we have returned to making profits!”

But Citi has had to pull out all the stops. Sure, high volatility and wide spreads meant a trading bonanza across fixed income and equities. Losses on subprime-related exposures were tempered, however, by a $2.7bn gain due to wider spreads on Citi’s credit default swaps. Excluding that, the $5.4bn writedown was a similar size to those of the second and third quarters of last year. Revenues were also boosted by almost $1bn from the sale of Redecard, a Brazilian credit card processor, as well as some legal and tax adjustments. Finally, it is odd that Citi reserved less this quarter given that the environment for consumers and companies is arguably getting worse.