Within two hours of paying what appears to be a plea-bargain fine of £360M in order to drop all US Federal charges, the rise in Goldman Sachs’ share-price effectively paid off the penalty – easily the biggest in US corporate history, and up there with the great daylight robberies of history. (In marketing, we used to call this a self-liquidating promotion).

In addition, RBS – one of Goldman’s bigger victims – will get around £80M compensation. The good news is we own it, the bad news is it won’t make even a dent in our deficit, and the worst news of all is that the bank lost nearly ten times that on its Goldman-marketed investments. I’d love to be David Cameron this morning rather pointedly asking Barack Obama if ten cents on the dollar is now the going rate for defrauded banks. Maybe he could apply the same fining principle to BP.

In addition to helping bankrupt Scotland’s biggest bank, Goldman also rammed a yardpole up the rear end of German bank IKB Deutsche Industriebank. This fine institution (whose former CEO was found guilty of fraud earlier this week) will receive £120m.

A Slog contact in New York – who admits candidly to never having been in a dole queue in his life – told us last night, “If I was standing in the unemployment lines right now, I’d be pretty pissed at this decision. This is as close to scot-free as it could get”.