All I want to know is... how big is my bonus?

The more ruthless toerags among you will sit back and decide that leaving your fate to lady luck is too big a gamble even for a Cityboy. You talk to other deranged degenerates you meet while confidently striding around this get-rich-quick loony bin and they tell that you it's possible to cheat the system.

They whisper to you that some of the croupiers are willing, for a price, to fix the game via something called "insider trading" while others explain that you can affect the outcome of your bets by spreading false rumours to your fellow gamblers.

While such practices are illegal you observe that only a handful of your peers have ever been prosecuted by the casino's security guards (the regulators) and hence it is a low-risk strategy. Since you spend your life analysing risk and reward you know such behaviour can offer massive upside with very little chance of being caught.

Hence, you begin pulling every trick in the book to ensure your short stay in the casino proves as lucrative as possible. But you're only working in equities or commodities or foreign exchange so, while cheating may perhaps double your salary, it's not going to mean you can spend the rest of your life contentedly sipping chilled pina coladas on a Caribbean beach.

However, if you were lucky enough to be working in structured finance, or more specifically mortgage-backed securities, in the mid-noughties, you had the opportunity to pull "the big score".

You were able to give your dumb-ass bosses, who sit back and never question success, the impression that you've raked in millions for your bank by inventing and trading "collateralized debt obligations".

They can't even spell these complex financial products, let alone understand them. Through clever accounting, you can pretend that you've made your bank millions and so rake in massive bonuses despite the fact that you know full well that these toxic loans are bound to explode at a later date because housing bubbles don't last for ever. You simply don't care. You've fooled the system and are going to get at least three or four huge end-of-year paydays that mean you can retire as soon as the whole house of cards comes crashing to the floor.

This, I'm afraid, is exactly what has happened at the beginning of this millennium. The short-term, asymmetrical nature of the investment banks' bonus system means that ruthless, selfish, savvy bankers (and believe me, that's pretty much all of them) had no qualms about infecting the world with over a trillion dollars of dodgy loans, backed up by mortgages that poor Yanks simply couldn't afford.

They exploded and created a recession that led to millions losing their jobs but the bankers didn't give a tinker's cuss because the money would keep on rolling in before some smart cookie pointed out that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

That's why there has to be a change in the way the City works. Unless the banks' incentive system is made to encourage longer-term thinking and reduce the benefits of short-term, reckless gambling, we will have another banker-based crisis over the next decade. Bonuses should be paid mainly in shares, rather than cash. They should also be deferred over several years and bosses should have the ability to claw them back if the profits they're based on later prove illusory.

Wednesday's Queen's Speech contained such proposals, and will allow the City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, to tear up excessive City remuneration packages that encourage undue risk-taking.

While many have dismissed Labour's proposed Financial Services Bill as clumsy political window-dressing designed to bash the bankers and so pander to popular demand prior to a May 2010 election, these changes need to be made. The motivation may be suspect but if nothing changes, the clever, ruthless people who populate the Square Mile will find another way to line their silk pockets, with scant regard for the implications their actions have for their fellow man and if that mentality produces another global crisis, then surely this time there will be blood on the streets.

Geraint Anderson is author of Cityboy – Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile