Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon struck a defiant tone on the bank's fourth-quarter earnings call, as it unveiled its best performance in a decade thanks to wild market swings spurred by the Covid-19 crisis.

Solomon, who took over from Lloyd Blankfein in 2018 and was widely questioned on why the bank had stuck to its guns by maintaining a huge sales and trading business while many of its rivals had cut back drastically since the 2008 financial crisis, said the bank's strategy was paying off.