NEW YORK — Goldman Sachs is still the king of Wall Street — at least when it comes to making money.
Four days after being accused by the government of fraud in the subprime-mortgage mess, the big investment bank reported blowout first-quarter profits Tuesday of $3.3 billion, nearly double from the same period a year ago. But it didn’t get to celebrate.
Goldman spent the day defending itself against the Securities and Exchange Commission’s charges and saw its troubles mount:
• Britain’s financial regulator began an investigation into the bank’s London-based international operations.
• The European Commission called for tighter regulation of the complex financial investments at the heart of the SEC case.
• Investors brushed off the eye-popping earnings and sent Goldman’s stock falling more than 2 percent. In the past three days, the company’s market value has declined by nearly $13 billion.
Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago, said he couldn’t recall another time when a company reported such stellar earnings only to see its stock fall. Goldman’s trading of bonds, commodities and currencies helped the company score another impressive quarter.
The firm earned $5.59 a share on revenue of $12.78 billion, above forecasts of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. It was Goldman’s second-most profitable quarter since going public in 1999. In the fourth quarter, Goldman earned a record $4.79 billion.
