The boss of Goldman Sachs reckons bankers are doing God’s work, while in America another five of God’s workers went bust, including one with a minor banking presence in China.

Blame the Devil, perhaps?

In an interview with the Sunday Times in London, Lloyd Blankfein also said he believed big profits and bonuses at banks were a sign that the world economy was recovering.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose,” he told the paper.

So far in 2009, 120 of these agents of Blankfein’s God have gone belly up in America.

The latest banks to be taken over were United Security Bank of Sparta, Georgia; Home Federal Savings Bank of Detroit; United Commercial Bank of San Francisco; Gateway Bank of St Louis and Prosperan Bank of Oakdale, Minnesota, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

That makes 21 banks now in Georgia, the largest casualty toll in any state. Taken the nine failures so far in Florida, the two states account for a quarter of all failures so far this year and more than the 25 in 2008.

United Commercial, which had branches across the US and also in Hong Kong and Shanghai, focused on the Chinese-American market in the US and had obtained a very difficult-to-get banking licence in China,

According to the Los Angeles Times, United Commercial received $US299 million ($A325.5 million) in federal bailout funds last year, making it the second failure of bank financial groups to have received so-called Tarp money. Last week CIT Financial failed and went into a pre-arranged bankruptcy. It had received $US2.3 billion in Tarp money and all of that is considered lost.

So if bankers are doing “god’s work as the Goldman Sachs boss says they are, where’s the Devil in all of this?

There are plenty of people who would assert bankers are the Devil’s spawn, especially for what they have done in helping trigger the global crunch.

There are plenty of bank shareholders (and employees) who would argue many bankers are merely incompetent and giving God and the Devil a bad name.