Say what you like about Goldman Sachs but it has an appalling sense of timing. Yesterday the bank announced a record pay-out for its staff, after setting aside $11.4bn in compensation for the first six months of the year. Today we hear that UK unemployment has risen to 2.38 million, a rise of 281,000. That’s two hundred and eighty one thousand more packets of human misery for those individuals and their families.

You don’t have to go the whole hog and denounce Goldman (as the recent famous Rolling Stone feature has done) as 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money' to feel somewhat queasy about this.  

It’s no longer just the Polly Toynbees of this world who are getting seriously steamed up about such amazing profits during the worst banking crisis since the 1930s. Have we all been conned? Made to look like fools? Over in the States, politicians are livid. Jon Tester, a Democrat on the senate banking committee, has yelled: 'They can’t continue along these lines or there will be outrage'. Even Lex in the FT speculates that 'the government could yet opt to cut this sucker down to size. Calamari anyone?'

But what exactly does Tester want Goldman to do? Be worse at their jobs and screw it up like Lehman Brothers did? Hand over a majority of its profits to those who have come unstuck with their sub-prime mortgages? Those who work there do it because they are in love with money, and the rest of us hope for a little 'trickle-down'. Goldman’s corporate tax-rate is apparently set at about 31%, compared to last year’s single digits - and its employees should be handing over income taxes of some $4bn should their first-half accruals turn into hard cash.

Alistair Darling can keep repeating until he’s blue in the face that very high City bonuses helped bankers to make reckless decisions that led to the credit crisis. But there’s no evidence in these Goldman results that they've been making any reckless decisions lately. Quite the reverse. They appear to understand risk better than their competitors, and so make better decisions. They seem to know where the money artery is, and are past masters at sucking as much cash as they can out of governments and companies now desperate to get bond issues away to raise badly-needed finance.

But this still leaves a moral revulsion that goes way beyond envy. The problem that Goldman has is that its sense of reality bears little resemblance to that of the rest of us in the real world. That’s partly because they are very publicity-shy and hate being in the spotlight. What they do is arcane and complex. If it were open and simple, we’d all be joining in. They just want to be left alone to make their vast piles of cash in peace, try to find some time to spend it and then worry later about squeezing through that needle-eye when they get carried out of the office, having suffered a stroke in front of the Bloomberg terminal.

I’m glad I’m not their PR man, which much be the most thankless (if hugely well-rewarded) of tasks. They badly need to get their head above the parapet and explain exactly why their alchemy is good for all of us. Even if, in their vampire squid’s heart of hearts, they actually believe what they do is really just good for them.

In today's bulletin:
Biggest jump in unemployment since records began
Goldman in new bonus row as profits soar to $3.4bn
Sunshine puts fizz in Britvic sales - but melts Thorntons' hopes
Editor's blog: Goldman Sachs and moral revulsion
No more shock treatment for Chinese web addicts