At the beginning of this month, I did a blog entry asking whether Goldman Sachs had engineered every market manipulation since the Great Depression.

Now the New York Times reports that Goldman Sachs is about to report a strong profit of more than $2 billion in the March-June period. According to the New York Times, the key has been its stomach for risks.

The NYT reports: "Traders said Goldman capitalized on the tumult in the credit markets to reap a fortune trading bonds. It profitably navigated a white-knuckled run in stock markets. It bought and sold volatile currencies, as well as commodities like oil. And it reaped lucrative fees from the high-margin business of underwriting stock offerings, which surged this year as other, more troubled financial institutions raced to raise capital ... While others are shying away from risks, Goldman is courting them. A common measure of risk-taking at Goldman and other banks is known as value at risk, which estimates how much money a firm might lose on a single day. At Goldman, that figure rose by more than 20 percent in the first quarter. Analysts predict Goldman's V.A.R. ran high in the second quarter as well."

It's a timely result in light of the revelations from Rolling Stone's Mark Taibbi that I detailed in my blog earlier this month.

The real concern is not only whetehr they can keep it up but also whether it might encourage other banks to take unsustainable risks. We've already seen too much of that.