The B-word sums up everything most people have come to hate about the financial industry. The Bonus Culture is convenient shorthand for what has gone wrong in the markets. When people try to find out just how the great catastrophe of the past two years could have happened, they focus on huge risks being taken for huge bonuses. When Congress wants to punish Wall Street, it threatens to take the bonuses away from the people who work there. When the British government wants to show it is getting tough with the City it gets Sir David Walker to produce a report saying that bonuses should be dribbled out over years instead of being paid all at once. When commentators want to say how banks should be run they warn of a huge gap between the interests of the shareholders and the managers as if financial companies were unique in having absentee owners (in fact they are far less absentee than in most industries because so much compensation is paid in shares that large chunks of these firms are owned by their employees.)

So poisonous has the word become that even the BBC, about as far removed from the City as you can get, has felt the need to ban all bonuses.

In polite society, no one seems willing to say straight out that they do not like other people earning so much more than they do, but that is obviously part of the underlying resentment that is there even at times when the banks have not had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the taxpayer. People will not say “bond traders should not be able to earn $10m”. Instead we get a stream of rationalisations about why the compensation system in finance, the “bonus culture”, is at the heart of the problem.