Citigroup

By Megan Murphy, Justin Baer, Francesco Guerrera, Patrick Jenkins, Jeremy Grant, Martin Arnold and Sam Jones

 By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing

Every once in a while, says New York magazine, there appears a character who floats above “the wretched, amoral, meatheads” of Wall Street. Andrew J Hall is such a man.

Few things stir the blood more than Wall Street firms getting into a good old scrap. Put aside the internecine squabbling at Morgan Stanley - they don't come much better than the current dust-up between Citigroup (metals "super cycle") and Goldman Sachs (oil "super spike"), and Merrill Lynch - whose chief equity strategist, David Bowers, on Monday poured water on the idea of what he described as a resources bubble.

In the highly unlikely event that Goldman Sachs loses $500m in its fourth quarter, which closes this week, it is sobering to think that it would still make record profits this year. Despite mediocre market conditions, a mild slowdown in the fixed-income markets, and the failure of the equities and merger and acquisitions businesses to recover, Goldman Sachs made more money in the first nine months than in any previous year.