Even the most well-intended regulations have unintended consequences. In the most egregious cases they end up incentivising the very behaviour they were designed to stop. And when it comes to the latest regulations on remuneration, regulators have perhaps excelled themselves in imposing a system that could explicitly encourage the sort of short-term risk taking that got us into this mess in the first place.

As a report from JP Morgan pointed out last week, the regulatory pressure for banks to defer an ever-greater proportion of bonuses into the future could be storing up trouble. Because banks account for deferred remuneration in the year in which it vests - instead of the year in which it is awarded - what used to be a highly variable cost has instead been transformed into a high fixed cost in the future. The report forecast that banks were storing up a worrying "highly fixed cost base… in a volatile revenue business".