On the fuel side, we have ethanol subsidies and the Renewable Fuel Standard, which is an implicit subsidy program.

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Impose a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP to cover the cost they would impose on taxpayers in a bailout, thus eliminating the implicit subsidy of their too-big-to-fail status.

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At the same time, banks during the boom years were able to crowd out alternative sources of corporate funding thanks to the flawed Basel bank regulations and the implicit subsidy arising from the too-big-to-fail problem.

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Most of this burden was carried as an implicit subsidy to domestic energy consumers, with the price of diesel fuel, for example, set at the equivalent of two American cents a litre, and petrol selling for less than bottled water.

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Lastly, a panoply of new tax credits and deductions has added to implicit fiscal subsidy with one hand as the government has tried to curb explicit help with the other.

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Or to put it another way, the big issue, of what Lloyds, RBS, HSBC and Barclays need to do for society to repay the implicit support and subsidy they receive from the state, isn't going away.

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