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Finance (No. 3) Bill

Absolutely; but, quite apart from the obscenity of the scale of some of those bonuses, there is a hard-headed economic rationale for more transparency. If shareholders cannot see what senior executives in the banking sector are being paid, that indicates a dysfunction in the corporate governance of the banks, and if the bonus pots of certain executives are being swelled by their behaviour—by the choices that they make and the risks that they are taking—perhaps those were some of the antecedents of the credit crunch. We need transparency to prevent us from repeating the problems that occurred in 2008.