A year of lockdowns can't take the shine off Goldmans Sachs profits

Profits at the bank are down less than $1bn even in a year when alleged scandal in Malaysia added to Covid woes

What is $900m to a Wall Street giant like Goldman Sachs? Relatively little, when it counts the drop in profits for a year of record-setting market swings and economic turmoil, all sparked by a pandemic.

The firm should regard itself as lucky to be poised for profits of about $7bn (5bn) for the whole of 2020. That average analyst forecast, compiled by Refinitiv, is a mere 11% drop from the $7.9bn it made in 2019, a year when the phrase Covid lockdown" had never been uttered.