Goldman Sachs doing God's Work?

Interesting, but for my taste, not revealing enough insight into the workings of Goldman Sachs today;

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6907681.ece

They sure are a money making machine! I have no issue with any bank making money by allocating capital to its trading and investment arms skilfully and deftly. My problem lies when those companies securing the lion's share of the finance transactions have an oligopolistic pricing structure coupled with access to the scarce resource of modern times, capital.

Now, I also have no issue with bankers being paid multi-million dollar bonuses if they add value of, say $100m to a client company bottom line. Simply sitting on assets that have gone up (and not even to pre crash levels) and making a margin on each trading deal simply because clients have few other options to go to execute their orders annoys me. For a bank to be rescued by the state (ie bust) and to be paying put $billions in bonuses 12 months later is frustrating to say the least.

The majority of Goldman's profits, it seems, comes from creaming off a profit margin from other companies activities (pension funds, insurance companies etc). The rest comes from betting on the financial markets and, I believe, influencing the level of those bets with the weight of its own capital.

Remember, making $10b profit on assets of $1trn (1%) doesn't sound that great and even on cash its a little more than 6%. I think that the majority of the earnings power of Goldman comes from its oligopolistic status and control over capital. With these advantages, making the sort of profits seen recently seems, well, a bit pathetic.