Where do bankers’ bonuses come from? Various sources – but promoting complex products to people who fail to understand them, or do not care how they work but like the commission involved, is definitely one.

But it is not the bankers who get hauled before the regulators when the products they design turn out badly. It is the people who sell them to the investors who suffer the losses. This state of affairs was questioned last week by Robert Jenkins, chairman of the UK’s Investment Management Association, in a letter to the Financial Times. He wrote in response to news of a regulatory probe into structured products and suggested that blame for mis-selling of structured products should be laid at the door of the investment banks that created the products rather than further down the distribution chain.