The Ebay-Skype saga may finally be nearing its finale. The founders of the internet telephony firm are hatching a plan to buy it back from the auctioneer – for less than they sold it for. That may seem a bitter pill for Ebay to swallow. But Skype’s weak fit in the company makes it a distraction. Ebay should sell it now.

Plunking down $3.1bn for Skype in 2005 wasn’t former Ebay chief Meg Whitman’s finest moment. The company wrote down the value of the unit by nearly half just two years later.

That doesn’t mean Skype is a complete dog. The service now has more than 400m registered users and accounts for nearly a tenth of all international calling minutes. It makes money, too. Its operating margins run above 20%, which helped it make earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of about $130m last year.

The trouble is, none of that helps Ebay much. Skype doesn’t fit into the company’s core businesses of online auctions and payments, and the synergies Ebay expected when it bought Skype – auctions coupled with live video – never materialised.

Instead, Skype ties up capital and management time that could be better deployed, for example to reinvigorate the stagnant auction business which has lost share to competitors Amazon and Craigslist, or to expand Paypal, the online payments business that is Ebay’s real growth engine.

So Skype’s potential could well be greater without Ebay. That may explain why the telephony firm’s founders are talking to private equity firms about financing a bid for the unit in the range of $2bn - 35% less than they sold it for.

Ebay could be temporarily embarrassed by a sale of Skype at that kind of price – even though the company has already written its value down. Of course, boss John Donahoe can blame the original purchase price on his predecessor, Whitman. What he wouldn’t be able to pin on her is missing a chance to rectify one of her biggest mistakes.

If the Wall Street investment bank was supposedly trampled by the panic of 2008, someone forgot to tell Goldman Sachs. The credit crisis killed off Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and ended Merrill Lynch’s independence. Goldman, the last of its peers to go public, has recovered from its fourth-quarter loss to make $1.8bn in the first three months of the year – more than double analysts’ estimates.

If the Wall Street investment bank was supposedly trampled by the panic of 2008, someone forgot to tell Goldman Sachs. The credit crisis killed off Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and ended Merrill Lynch’s independence. Goldman, the last of its peers to go public, has recovered from its fourth-quarter loss to make $1.8bn in the first three months of the year – more than double analysts’ estimates.

And that’s despite some poor numbers in some of its core businesses: incentive fees on hedge funds were virtually non-existent, principal investments recorded a $1.4bn net loss and depressed equity and mergers and acquisitions markets hit investment banking fees and prime brokerage revenue.

In truth, it’s hard not to gander at Goldman’s earnings and conclude the firm, which along with rival Morgan Stanley sought refuge by becoming a bank holding company, is trying to prove the investment bank model it appeared to have dropped is still alive and kicking.

For starters, the firm’s black box trading operations provided most of the juice. Second, in an act that seems like biting its thumb to Congress, Goldman set aside more revenue to pay staff, both as a percentage of revenue and on an absolute basis, than last year.

And Goldman executives also appear to have called a halt to shrinking the group’s balance sheet. Sure, assets only rose by 5% since last quarter to $925bn, but that’s a stark change to the deleveraging that has beset the financial sector for a year or more.

Those are some punchy tactics for a firm hoping to convince the Treasury to allow it to pay back the $10bn of taxpayer-funded capital foisted upon it last autumn. But Goldman appears to have the numbers to back it up – and to persuade shareholders to stump up for its $5bn stock sale. If Goldman is any evidence, Wall Street isn’t in its coffin just yet.