But actually it could have been a lot worse.

The government is expected to get back all the cash it put into the bank - some £37bn - and quite a lot more.

What it won't get back, says the NAO, is enough to compensate the public sector either for the risks it ran in saving the troubled mortgage bank or for locking up its money in loans to the Rock for many years.

Think of that loss as the equivalent of what you would lose if you lent money to a friend at a low interest rate rather than getting a higher interest rate by putting that money into a savings account (of course I am assuming you can still find a high-interest account in this world of artificially depressed interest rates, but I think you know what I mean).

For the NAO, that notional £2bn loss is probably a price that was worth paying: it prevented a banking collapse that could have been contagious and could have led to the demise of other banks; also the survival of the Rock maintained the supply of mortgages at a time when other banks were reining in lending.

That said, the NAO points out that in 2010 and 2011 the state-owned Rock supplied fewer mortgages than it promised - £9.1bn of them, or 39% less than the £15bn of its business plan.

All that said, the NAO's criticism of the nationalisation and break-up of the bank is largely restricted to a failure by the then Labour government to fully investigate the financial consequences of breaking up the bank into a so-called good bank and a bad bank.

But even that charge is not too embarrassing for the chancellor of the time, Alastair Darling, because the NAO says the oversight has not led to any significant additional costs for the state.

The downgrades are due in part to the difficulties Spain is having in cutting its deficit and concerns that it lacks the resources to support struggling banks in a crisis.

Also there are fears of rising losses for Spanish banks from their loans to the bloated property sector and on other loans, due to the contraction of Spain's economy.

The downgrade is least significant for the biggest of the banks, including Santander in the UK, whose borrowing costs are not expected to rise significantly.

Here is a great paradox: the big decision to press the button on creating the euro was a French attempt to shackle the economic and political power of a unifying Germany, but it has had the perverse consequence of reinforcing German power within the eurozone and the European Union.

A film on this subject which I've made with the producer John Thynne tries to shed light on the gravity of the mess they (and we) are in now - and what may be required for the eurozone to survive in the longer term.

If you had any doubts that we were minutes away from financial and economic catastrophe before Christmas, the European Central Bank does not.

"In the autumn of 2011, the conditions were very dangerous," one of its executive directors, Benoit Coeure, told me. "European banks were facing severe difficulties to fund themselves, to access finance, and we were very close to having a collapse in the banking system in the euro area, which would have also led to a collapse in the economy and to deflation. And this is something that the ECB could not accept."

So the ECB put 800 European banks on life support, by providing more than a trillion euros of emergency three-year loans to them. As Mr Coeure concedes, this so-called LTRO is a temporary prop, not a solution to the euro's ills.

"It is a pain-killer, a very powerful one... This period of calm has to be used by governments to fix the underlying issues, the fiscal (deficit) issues and the competitiveness issues that European countries are facing."

Since I saw Mr Coeure a few weeks ago, the calm has evaporated. There are escalating fears that Greece will leave the euro - and that the ensuing turmoil will force a more serious fracture of the currency union.

The big indebted economies, Spain and Italy, look considerably weaker, their economies shrinking, and unemployment rising. The borrowing costs of their governments are soaring once more, a sign that investors are growing concerned again about the health of their public finances and of their banks.

What is required is a tremendous collective effort by the eurozone's members. In practice, this is widely seen to need a greater willingness by Germany to deploy more of its fearsome financial resources to help the weaker economies, such as Spain and Italy, in their period of painful transition.

But a sharing of the debt burden requires near revolution in the way the EU is governed, according to a trio of the grand old men of Europe.

"The crisis makes at least one thing obvious and that is we need more of Europe, we need the political union as the only way to save the stability of the euro," the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, said.

Given that his party, the SPD, could well be in power again next year, we may well see progress towards this political union.

One of the great figures of global central banking, Jean-Claude Trichet - president of the European Central Bank during many of the euro's formative years - made a similar point. "In a single market with a single currency… it seems to me that Europe could go for a federation."

Without such a federation, can the single currency survive, I asked Helmut Schlesinger, another influential central banker who has seen the odd financial crisis at close quarters and was president of the Bundesbank when sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

"I cannot make any long-term predictions in this regard," he said. "One should consider that monetary unions, or more precisely, coin unions, have survived for a long time, but never for more than three or four decades.

"My personal experience with the German currency is that it has undergone changes at three occasions during my lifetime. When I was born, it was changed into the reichsmark. When I began to work, it became the deutsche mark. And when I became a pensioner, it became the euro.

"The average lifetime of a currency is, as you can see, limited, as a rule, except when it is a great state with an endlessly long, beautiful history, from the kings of the Middle Ages until the Queen nowadays. Then you have got a long monetary history."

But in Europe, that is not the case. "And I would say that either we get the United States of Europe, that is an actual political union, and then that political union gets its own currency. But then it is no monetary union any longer, but the currency of that new state.

"Or let's stay with the current situation which we find ourselves in at the moment, and then it could be that this monetary union will not necessarily dissolve, but change, extend, scale down. I do not know. My horizon, my prognosis is very limited in time."

So what is going to happen: creation of the European superstate and survival of the euro, or a disastrous monetary and political disintegration? I hope Thursday's programme will give you the information you need to form a judgement on will determine not just the eurozone's future prosperity but Britain's too.

The Great Euro Crash with Robert Peston is on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Thursday 17 May. Watch online (UK only) via iPlayer at the above link

On the one hand, it didn't sink JP Morgan: the bank has enough equity and is generating sufficient profit to absorb the loss.

On the other hand, the bank's chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is utterly mortified that he allowed the loss to grow and grow, under his nose, and in spite of warnings in the media that one of the bank's London-based trading desks, home of the famous Whale, was engaging in huge and potentially risky transactions.

So, as one senior international regulator said to me, the debacle should reinforce his and his colleagues attempts to force banks to hold vastly more capital as a protection against losses on banks' trading activities (the Basel Committee's "fundamental review of trading book capital requirements").

In the US, it may also derail attempts by banks to water down the post-crash prohibition on how they trade for their own benefit in the drafting of the detailed rules for the implementation of the so-called Volcker Rule.

"It is all pretty good for us", this regulator said.

Is he right? There is another way of seeing the Morgan mess, which - some would say - reflects poorly on bankers and regulators: it highlights that bankers have been forced by regulators to do almost nothing to eliminate the impenetrable complexity of how they operate.

Morgan's $2bn plus loss has been generated by the way that a series of opaque and complicated transactions were heaped on top of each other, each one intended to offset or hedge the impact of the previous transaction, but whose cumulative impact appears to have been just short of lethal.

These deals appear to have been initiated by JP Morgan's perhaps laudable attempt to protect itself from the impact of a recession in the eurozone: it used derivative contracts whose value would have risen if there was a rise in defaults on loans, which would have mitigated the losses for JP Morgan from defaults on the vast loans it makes to companies in the normal course of business.

Now whether banks really need to insure themselves against possible defaults in that way is moot. The better protections may be the old-fashioned ones: make sure you lend to businesses with a great variety of different characteristics, so that they are very unlikely to all go bust at the same time; and try to know your customers well enough to measure the risks you are taking.

However perhaps it is luddite to rail against all financial innovation. It may make sense for banks to be allowed some degree of financial protection, or insurance, against changing economic conditions.

But how much "protection" can any bank sensibly need?

At the beginning of this year JP Morgan seems to have taken out another series of insurance contracts to heap on top of the first lot.

These ones, called credit default swaps, appear to have had the characteristic of potentially yielding a profit for JP Morgan if the debt of highly rated companies performed significantly better than that of lowly rated companies. So they can be seen as a hedge against the first hedge.

And then there seems to have been a third hedge taken out, described in today's Wall Street Journal as "protection on investment-grade bonds" - which appears to have been protection against the risk that the second hedge went wrong.

Also, according to the WSJ, there was "a related trade...allowing the bank to capture the premium between the cost of default protection ending in 2014 and the cost of protection ending in 2017".

If you have the faintest idea what that means, you will be doing quite a lot better than quite a lot of the individuals who sit on the boards of big international banks and are supposed to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Here is the thing. With three or possibly four huge layers of derivative deals heaped on top of JP Morgan's loans of more than $700bn, it is not surprising that the bank was unable to keep track of the risks it was running.

What is surprising is that a banker of Mr Dimon's reputation and experience allowed this to happen.

One under-reported but highly significant aspect of the whole extraordinary incident is that Mr Dimon announced that he was abandoning a new financial system for monitoring the risks run by the Chief Investment Office and reverting to the old one - because the new model was chronically understating the potential losses the bank could have generated on any given day.

Mr Dimon disclosed that the Chief Investment Office's transactions had the potential to generate losses at any instant of $129m, which is not far off double what the bank had been admitting as the daily "value at risk".

So what is the big issue here?

At JP Morgan itself there will be some nervousness that the Department of Justice and the FBI have opened a preliminary investigation of whether the bank broke any rules.

But as we still count the cost of the 2007-8 banking crisis, there is something much more important at stake - which is whether governments and regulators have made a fundamental error in the way they reacted to that crisis.

The response of the Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Board, the European Commission and the G20 has been to devise ever more complicated and more detailed rules to limit the risks to banks and the wider economy of the byzantine complexity of the way banks manage themselves and the astonishing counter-intuitive complexity of products created by financial innovation.

But if the financial system that evolved over the past 20 years is now so huge, sprawling and opaque as to defy comprehension or reliable risk assessment, maybe a better way would have been to start prohibiting certain activities.

Would it have been so naive and futile to attempt to contain the risks of banking by forcing banks to become simpler, easier-to-understand institutions?

Maybe - and this is what some people believe - if they dropped the euro for a new drachma, and were able to retain some access to credit, perhaps from the IMF, the transition for Greece wouldn't be quite as painful.

There are quite a lot of serious people who take the view that a managed exit of Greece from the euro might be the way to go. The difficulty is that there's no obvious sign Germany, France and other countries will help Greece make that transition.

What if Greece exits the eurozone?

The point, as I am sure you know by now, is that the eurozone crisis is a sovereign debt crisis and an inextricably connected banking crisis (and to get my plug in early, if you want to know more about this, you could watch "The Great Euro Crash, with Robert Peston" this coming Thursday on BBC2 at 9pm).

And for Europe's banking system, once the Rubicon has been crossed of a country leaving the euro, once it is demonstrated that there is an exit, all sorts of horrible things follow.

Perhaps most importantly, any business of any nationality will find it extremely difficult to leave its money in euros in a bank in a country perceived to be at risk of following Greece out the door. That risk was already highlighted earlier this year in public statements of Vodafone, GlaxoSmithKline, WPP and Reckitt Benckiser that they were moving their surplus cash out of euros and out of the eurozone on a daily basis.

To be clear, it's not just British and non-eurozone companies that are under an obligation to their owners to avoid (as far as they can) the devaluation and credit risk of letting their cash sit in Ireland, Portugal, Spain or Italy, the economies buckling under the burden of the most troublesomely large debts. The same duty would fall on big international Italian companies in Italy, or Spanish ones in Spain, and so on.

Because the thing about global financial capitalism is that it is very hard for mobile multinational businesses to put patriotism before the preservation of wealth.

Of course it is not just companies. Citizens too, if they are able to do so, have a huge economic incentive right now to take their money out of Greek banks, and either hold it in cash or transfer it to a perceived safe haven, such as Germany.

These trends, of banks in the vulnerable economies finding it increasingly hard to hang on to deposits and increasingly hard to borrow, have been conspicuous for months. And they have had two important consequences for the European Central Bank and for the central banks of the stronger economies, especially Germany's, the Bundesbank.

The first, which you will know about, has been the massive emergency bailout of banks by the European Central Bank, with the trillion euros of cheap three-year loans it has provided to them in the so-called LTRO. The ECB has been providing the credit to banks that financial institutions and big companies were increasingly reluctant to provide.

And, as you would expect, Italian and Spanish banks took about 60% of all the net new loans from the ECB, with Spain's overstretched banks taking marginally more than Italy's.

A Greek departure from the euro, which accelerated withdrawal of cash from banks in other vulnerable economies, would surely create the imperative for yet more emergency ECB lending to banks.

And since the European Central Bank and the national central banks insist on lending only in return for collateral, there is a danger that banks would shortly run out of collateral of sufficient quality.

Which means the ECB would face the uncomfortable choice of turning off the life support, and see quite a few banks falling over, or lending on the basis of inadequate security - and thus taking significant credit risks with these loans.

The most likely outcome is that the banking system of the eurozone would become significantly more nationalised, kept alive on the drip of exceptional central bank credit. This is neither healthy or sustainable.

But quite apart from the explicit lending to banks, the ECB and central banks of the stronger economies, especially the Bundesbank, also have a huge "counterparty" risk to Greece, Italy and Spain from the way that the payments system in the eurozone works.

Under this system, called Target2, one consequence of businesses and households taking their money out of the bank accounts of the deficit countries, such as Greece, Italy and Spain, is that the German central bank ends up lending vast sums to the central banks of those deficit countries.

Here is a slightly simplified account of how this works: when someone takes 100 euros from a Greek bank and transfers it to the perceived safety of a German bank (which has been happening quite a lot), that Greek bank gets the 100 euros from the Greek central bank, which in turn borrows the money from the Bundesbank.

Here is the thing. As of March of this year, the German central bank had 644bn euros of claims on other central banks, equivalent to a quarter of German GDP. These are euros owed to the Bundesbank by the central banks of the economies where there has been the greatest capital flight, names those of Greece, Italy and Spain.

So if all of a sudden, Greece and Italy and Spain decided to revert to their national currencies, it is an interesting question how much (if any) of the 644bn euros the Bundesbank could get back.

Now it is true that under the Target2 rules, the liability for losses on these balances is supposed to be shared between all eurozone central banks in proportion to their respective shareholdings in the European Central Bank. Which would mean that the Bundesbank's loss from non-repayment of what it is owed by the Greek central bank, for example, would be 19% of what the Greek central banks owes to all the eurozone's central banks.

But if the entire eurozone fractured completely, it is difficult to see how that distribution of losses could take place. In practice, the Bundesbank would surely have to take the entire hit - and then, I suppose, it could sue Italy, Spain and the rest for compensation.

However there is a more pressing and more important point. Let's say Greece withdraws from the euro and is unable or unwilling to settle the 100bn euros or so it owes the other eurozone central banks under the Target2 payments system.

And on top of that there would be a huge write-off of the separate 50bn euros of Greek government bonds held by the ECB and eurozone national central banks.

At that point it would become obvious to the citizens of Germany that they have been lending rather more to the eurozone's weaker economies than the eurozone's leaders have been telling them.

Here is the interesting question. What would be the impact on German public opinion of finding out that German taxpayers had lost tens of billions of euros on loans to Greece that they did not know they had made?

Would they feel a rush of solidarity with the other weaker eurozone economies and feel that Germany would redouble its financial support for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland?

There must be a danger that, in those circumstances, there would be such a backlash of public anger that it would be even harder for Germany's leaders to provide the scale and kind of financial succour essential to the eurozone's survival.

Since the global banking crisis of 2008, there have been four attempts by the Spanish government - two by the current one, two by its predecessor - to shore up a banking system seriously weakened by reckless property and construction loans.

Today the Spanish finance minister, Luis de Guindos, announced that lenders must make 30bn euros or £24bn of additional provisions to cover potential losses on such loans - on top of 54bn euros they were ordered to set aside in February.

Analysts fear that the implied assumption, that the banks will have to write off just under half of all their property loans, may still prove too optimistic.

And they are also concerned that the banks are not taking sufficient steps to insulate themselves from probable losses on other categories of loans, such as mortgages and corporate loans, that are likely to escalate in a Spanish recession expected to last another year or more.

But perhaps the greater concern is how little additional capital, to absorb the potential losses, the Spanish government expects to have to inject into banks and also its chosen method for doing so.

Mr de Guindos said he expected taxpayers would inject less than 15bn euros into the banks in this latest rescue.

This is a fraction of what some bankers believe to be needed. Mr de Guindos is seen to be too optimistic both about the ability of banks to raise capital without the help of taxpayers and how much capital the banks will end up needing.

Also Mr de Guindos is planning to provide this capital in the form of five-year debt convertible into shares rather than as pure shares - and would charge the banks interest at twice what the government has to pay to borrow for five years.

So right now the government would be charging the banks more than 10% a year for this capital.

Here is what some see as the big problem with this rescue plan. Athough 10% interest may be the correct commercial price to extract from banks, it will do nothing to enlarge their profit margins or provide banks with the resources to provide additional loans to households and businesses.

In other words, a damaging credit crunch currently prevailing in Spain may be elongated and intensified.

All that said, and following pressure from the European Commission, the centre-right government will commission two independent assessments of banks' balance sheets, to verify whether its rehabilitation plan is realistic.

Investors have chosen not to wait for that verdict: shares have tumbled and the implied cost for the Spanish government of borrowing for ten years has once again broken through the symbolically important - and anxiety inducing - 6% threshold.

The probability that Spain may ultimately need a bailout from the eurozone and IMF has not diminished in any conspicuous way.

But that reputation has taken a serious knock with the disclosure last night that a trading desk in London has lost $2bn - and perhaps more - on deals in what are known as corporate credit derivatives, or insurance against the danger of loans to companies going bad.

I am not sure it helps that the bank's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has been refreshingly frank, blaming "errors, sloppiness and bad judgement".

Strikingly, he has not said that these transactions, carried out for JPMorgan's own benefit (or disbenefit, as it turns out) through its chief investment office, were unauthorised or down to a putative "rogue trader".

These deals were supposed to be a so-called hedge, an attempt to reduce the risks taken by the bank. That is why the incident is more than a big embarrassment for JPMorgan, although - for the avoidance of doubt - it will put a dent in the bank's profits for 2012 but won't anywhere near eliminate them.

It is the surprise factor - the shock evinced by Mr Dimon - that will reignite the debate about whether regulators need to take more decisive action to curb the complexity of investment banks, to better prevent this kind of accident.

Apart from anything else, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal both highlighted the big credit-derivative positions being taken by JPMorgan in London a few weeks ago, and the bank rejected the suggestion that there were serious dangers here.

So the JPMorgan trading loss will resonate and reverberate.

In the US, it will strengthen the argument of those fighting a rearguard action from the banks to water down the Volcker rule, which is supposed to prevent banks taking big investments for their own account.

In the UK, it may mean revisiting whether the proposed ring fence between retail banking and investment banking is protection enough for essential banking services.

As for big global banks, they are engaged in a fraught debate with Moody's to dissuade the ratings agency from downgrading many of them, in a way that would make it much more expensive for them to borrow and would squeeze their profits.

JPMorgan's accident won't strengthen their case that they are less risky institutions than Moody's fears.

To put this another way, will the cost of rehabilitating its banking system be greater than Spanish taxpayers can afford?

And if the price is unbearably large, would it make sense for Spain to request a bailout from the International Monetary Fund or the eurozone's European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) or both?

According to a senior banker, we will get some of the answers on Friday, when the Spanish government is expected to decide what level of losses Spanish banks should be obliged to recognise on their reckless property and construction loans, on top of 50bn euros of provisions they have already been forced to make to cover potential losses.

This banker expects just a handful of savings banks - of which the biggest and most important is Bankia - to be instructed to set aside 25bn to 30bn euros to cover the additional costs of loans going bad.

This is expected to lead to the partial nationalisation of Bankia, which is Spain's biggest retail bank with around 15% of domestic banking assets.

The partial nationalisation will be a controversial operation, because it will lead to huge losses for many thousands of Spanish investors, who bought shares in Bankia and provided it with loan capital when it was listed on the stock market last year.

There are fears that if the value of Bankia's shares were wiped out in the rescue, this could prompt such anxiety among savers that they could withdraw their savings from Bankia, further weakening the bank.

So why are Spain's savings banks in such a mess?

Well, the central bank, the Bank of Spain, has estimated - in its last Financial Stability Report - that Spanish banks are sitting on what it calls "troubled" property and construction loans of 184bn euros, equivalent to more than 17% of Spanish GDP.

Those loans are the poisonous legacy of a housing and construction boom that saw 5 million new homes built between 1997 and 2007, twice the increase in new Spanish households. Whole ghost towns were built.

Such is the dire quality of these loans that the banks are assuming they will ultimately get back only half or less of what they lent.

So it is possible that the banks are getting close to having properly recognised the scale of pain they face on this category of their lending.

However, they may not yet have made proper provision for likely losses on other categories of loan, notably residential mortgages, loans to small companies, and loans to highly indebted big companies.

That is why bankers, regulators and analysts increasingly fear that the capital banks will need as a protection against these losses may exceed what can be raised from conventional investors and Spanish taxpayers.

That said, there are substantial costs and risks for Spain in borrowing the money from the eurozone's bailout fund, the EFSF, quite apart from the humiliation of being seen to have its economic policy dictated by Germany.

One potential pitfall of taking a rescue loan from the eurozone is that it would probably have the effect of subordinating Spain's existing sovereign debt.

To put it another way, the implicit value of the Spanish government's existing debts would be reduced. And that would then force even greater losses, perhaps calamitous losses, on the banks, which have lent well over 260bn euros to the Spanish public sector.

So some bankers argue that Spain might be better off asking the IMF for emergency funds that could go directly to the banks, rather than counting as a loan to the government.

How long can the Spanish government prevaricate and fail to make sure the banks have all the capital they need?

Well probably not that long, because Spanish banks are reining in their lending, and thus damaging the Spanish economy, in response to their capital deficiency.

Based on the recently published results of Spain's seven publicly listed banks, the investment bank Morgan Stanley calculates that lending in Spain is contracting at a damaging annual rate of around 8%.

A credit crunch is exacerbating Spain's recession.

If all this sounds familiar, that is because it is - to a great extent - a re-run of the collapse of Ireland's banks.

Just like Spain, Ireland for months insisted it had the resources to sort out its banks on its own. But in the autumn of 2010, it capitulated in the face of horrific market reality, and went cap in hand to the eurozone and IMF.

The other lesson of Ireland, many would say, is that the longer a government fails to face up to the true weakness of its banks, the bigger the eventual costs of the remedy.

One part of the Spanish government's plan to strengthen the banks has happened tonight.

Spain's banking bailout fund, the FROB, will convert a 4.47bn-euro loan to Bankia into shares in the troubled bank.

This amounts to a partial nationalisation of the bank, because state fund will emerge with a stake in the bank of 45%.

Whether that will be the last injection of taxpayers' money into Bankia, we shall have to wait and see.

The Bank of Spain, the Spanish central bank, said tonight:

"The new management of Bankia will have to submit, as soon as possible, a fortified clean-up plan that will place it in a position to address its future with every guarantee of success."

The central bank added: "Bankia is a solvent institution that continues to operate on an absolutely normal footing. Its customers and depositors have no cause for concern."

I may have committed a solecism in my note yesterday on the impact of a possible bailout of Spain's banks.

In theory, loans from the European Financial Stability Facility do not have preferred creditor status, whereas loans from the IMF and from the EFSF's successor, the European Stability Mechanism, do have preferred status.

So if Spain wants to avoid the danger of its existing sovereign debt acquiring second class status in any bailout, it would probably be better off nipping in fast and asking for EFSF help - rather than hanging about and taking the risk that ultimately it will need succour from the ESM or IMF.

Or to put it another way, in respect of the impact on Spain's overall borrowing costs, the EFSF might well be the cheapest option.

The government will amend company law so that shareholder votes on big businesses' prospective remuneration plans for executives will be binding - as opposed to the current system of advisory votes (which have the power to embarrass companies but not to compel them).

When I spoke yesterday to the business secretary Vince Cable, who is championing the reform, he confirmed to me that one point still at issue is the voting threshold which public companies have to exceed for their pay plans to go through.

For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Cable is still actively considering the idea that a simple majority of shareholders in favour of remuneration policy may not be appropriate. For companies to secure approval of the millions they wish to pay their executives, he may require a bigger majority - perhaps 60%, perhaps 75% (he is not specifying).

So why shouldn't the normal democratic rule, that a simple majority is all that's needed for legitimacy, apply here?

Well campaigners on this issue point out that many investors behave like absentee landlords - they never vote, or when they do vote, they unthinkingly vote the way that a company's board recommends.

More specifically, there is overwhelming evidence that companies with large number of shareholders from outside the UK - especially from Asia and the Middle East - have a much better chance of avoiding embarrassing votes on pay plans, because these overseas investors tend to be uninterested and unexcited by remuneration issues.

I am told that one reason why Aviva lost its recent remuneration vote is simply because it had the bad luck to be largely owned by UK investors. Certainly in the long history of egregious or bonkers pay policies, Aviva looks by no means the worst - though it is one of a miniscule number ever to have lost these votes.

Now, as I have mentioned before, UK investors - especially pensions funds and life companies who manage the savings of millions - are becoming much more engaged with the businesses they own and much less unthinking about the way they vote.

Many would see that as a very good thing. And I think it largely reflects their fears that if they fail to reflect the mood of the public that businesses have to be kept on the straight and narrow, the greater public will decided to take their savings to institutions whose relationship with businesses is more responsible.

So the question is how best to nurture and encourage this transformation of investors from quick-buck merchants into thoughtful stewards - and how also to persuade company boards that they ignore the wishes of their owners at their peril.

Strikingly, the CBI - which represents the interests of big companies - and the ABI, which represents the interests of some big shareholders, have both told Mr Cable that they think the threshold for victory in a remuneration vote should be the conventional one of 50% plus one vote.

One leading fund manager said to me that he feared that if the threshold for success was 75%, as some have suggested, company chairs would have to spend all their time working through the minutiae of company pay policy with shareholders, and too little time setting the wealth-creating strategy of their companies.

Strikingly however the NAPF, which represents pension funds, has given me this nuanced statement:

"The NAPF supports the Government's proposals for a binding vote on future remuneration but has reservations about the practicality of a 75% voting threshold for its approval, based on the practical implications of its introduction, such as the additional power given to a minority block holder.

"However, we do not rule it out completely as it would certainly help focus minds among company boards and investors and be an incentive to early and effective engagement. We therefore suggest that there be a transition period when all parties can evaluate the workings of the new regime with a view to moving to an appropriate threshold once the system has bedded down."

Now I would not be at all surprised if this suck-it-and-see suggestion appealed to Vince Cable. As he said to me yesterday, he is concerned that the current wave of protest votes against excessive executive pay could turn out to be a passing fad - and he therefore wants a constitutional change that would lead to a permanent transformation of big institutional shareholders into properly informed and engaged proprietors.

Last week, Sly Bailey announced she would be standing down from the newspaper group Trinity Mirror.

And in the previous week, the early departure of David Brennan from his role as boss of the pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca, was announced.

Three's a trend, they say. But what is the trend?

It is fashionable to view the current spate of resignations as being a response to complaints from shareholders about big pay.

Which is understandable, since investors have been highly critical of the remuneration of Mr Moss and Ms Bailey - and Aviva suffered the humiliation last week of losing a vote on its executive remuneration package.

But actually that's not the trend.

The departures are a response to criticism by shareholders of what they see as the poor performance of the relevant companies. In these circumstances, executive rewards often become the specific object of shareholder unhappiness, because of the perceived unfairness that top executives should be handsomely rewarded when their respective businesses are performing in average way or worse.

Shareholders are saying that if they're not being enriched, executives should not be sleeping on huge piles of cash.

In other words, the trend is of growing activism by shareholders to prevent unmerited rewards, or excessive pay relative to how the business is doing. It is not a campaign against big pay per se.

If you need convincing on this point, read the statement made by John MacFarlane, the deputy chairman of Aviva, who is becoming the chairman of the insurer in July and will take Mr Moss's executive duties till a permanent replacement is found. Mr Macfarlane said:

"My first priorities are to regain the respect of our shareholders by eliminating the discount in our share price".

And he then goes on to list a set of priorities, such as an assessment of which of Aviva's businesses can "generate superior returns over the cycle", which are all about creating the conditions for a rise in the company's share price.

So, as I said on the Today Programme, those who think and hope that what's going on will lead to a significant reduction in the rewards for executives in general may be disappointed.

The influential investors to whom I have spoken are not opposed to big executive pay per se. They are against what they see as unmerited big pay, or pay that's not properly linked to the performance of the business (and see what I wrote about the row over executive pay at Barclays for more on this).

Now it is possible that the collective decision of British pension funds and life insurers to become more actively involved in the governance of companies may end the inflation of executive rewards or even lead to a bit of deflation.

But if that happens, it is because shareholders will have finally lost patience with the disproportionate distribution of corporate profits between them and executives, after more than a decade of rewards for executives rising much faster than rewards for shareholders.

What we are seeing, however, is not a great revolt by fund managers against the idea that individuals who are stewards of other people's assets should ever be paid millions.

Fund managers themselves are stewards of other people's money in a way that is not dissimilar to the role played by the executives of public companies: to coin the golden rule of stock-market capitalism, turkeys rarely vote for Christmas.

Its operating profit bounced back to £1.18bn, up very fractionally from the beginning of last year and - importantly - a big swing from the £144m loss for the fourth quarter of 2011.

In the decade since shareholders obtained the right to vote on what public companies have paid their senior people for the past year and what they plan to pay them for the coming year - the contents of the so-called remuneration report - just three FTSE 100 businesses have lost the votes (according to research by Manifest).

Last night, I heard Sir Mervyn King, in the Today Programme Lecture, largely excusing the Bank of England for its failure to prevent the great crash of 2007-8: he blamed the recklessness of banks; he blamed a collective "failure of imagination" to see that banks' huge increase in lending was the mother of all dangerous bubbles waiting to burst; he blamed the last Labour government for stripping the Bank of England in 1997 of its direct powers to regulate banks.

It is worth quoting in full:

The bank which became more dependent than any other on loans from the Bank of England and the Treasury at the height of the 2007-8 financial crisis has almost completely repaid what it owes taxpayers.

Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, will announce later today that he is selling the government's residual 40% stake in Actis, the world's leading emerging-markets private-equity fund, for $10m (£6.2m) in cash plus a large future share of what is known as carried interest in three funds.

Because of an economic downturn in the UK described by NAB's chief executive Cameron Clyne as "longer and slower to recover than experienced in the 1930s following the Great Depression", the bank has decided to cut 1,400 UK jobs, pull out of commercial property lending here and concentrate on retail and small business banking.

Instead they have called on shareholders to take a closer interest in executive pay - and to protest when executive rewards are deemed to be excessive.

It wants the documents that News Int has been ordered by Lord Justice Moss to give to alleged hacking victims who are suing the UK newspaper group owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.