Some customers of Barclays may have choked on their croissants this morning when they heard about their bank's record profits.
Last year, Britain's third-largest bank, notched up earnings of £5.2bn, a 15% rise over the previous year, but it is still raising some of its charges. The bank has begun writing to customers to tell them that the fee for bounced cheques and unauthorised overdrafts will go up by £5 to £35.
Barclays, which has about 11 million current account holders, defended its decision by saying that such fees have stood still since 2003, but this will undoubtedly come as scant reason for Barclays customers.
The banking sector as a whole is set to report fat earnings, with HSBC set to post profits of £11bn next month, and such numbers makes some people uneasy. As the Guardian's outgoing financial editor, Paul Murphy, noted in his farewell to readers last week, at this time of year he finds himself in the "excruciating" position of arguing to sceptical newsroom colleagues that healthy profits at big UK banks are good for Britons.
The same sense of unease breaks out whenever companies report huge profits - as was the case of Shell, BP and Tesco not too long ago. The fact that big companies can make such piles of lucre somehow raises hackles among lots of people.
But imagine the outcry if these companies did not perform, if they did not make profits. There would be accusations of incompetence and calls for the bosses to be sacked. Making profits is their raison d'être, after all.
In fact, the Office for National Statistics yesterday provided ample evidence why profitable companies are good for ordinary citizens.
The ONS reported that Britain enjoyed its biggest monthly surplus on the public finances since records began in 1993, thanks to a wave of tax receipts from oil companies and City bonuses.
That may all sound highly removed from our daily lives, but because the public finances are in good shape, the chancellor Gordon Brown does not need to raise taxes or cut spending in order to keep plug a "black hole" in the country's finances.
So does this mean that greed is good as Gordon Gekko put in Oliver Stone's Wall Street? Let's put it this way, as long as companies pay their employees properly and as long as the government taxes company profits and spreads the proceeds to the rest of us in the form of good schools and hospitals, let Barclays and HSBC reap those profits.
