After months of near total lethargy regarding bonuses, institutional shareholders are showing signs of movement.

This week, they came up with a cunning plan: bonuses should only be paid out of the profits banks would have generated had they never had any government assistance.

"It would be preferable if the effect of the government intervention was removed from the calculation," Colin Melvin, chief executive of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, told the Telegraph.

But discounting government intervention isn’t simply a matter of removing a variable from an equation.

The Economist had a go at it last week, arguing that as a result of governmental guarantees, banks are able to raise funds at rates that are 2% lower than would otherwise be possible. The magazine argued they should pay a funding ‘premium’ as a result.

The reality is that government support has been a far more pervasive contributor to this year’s huge profits.

It emerged this week that the US government paid par for AIG CDS, even though 40-70 cents on the dollar would have been more realistic. As a result, Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance argues that Goldman clearly benefitted from the AIG bailout, even though it said at the time that he, “would expect the direct impact of our credit exposure to both of them to be immaterial to our results.”

“If AIG had gone under, the already illiquid market would have frozen. Collateral requirements for all trading would have increased and Goldman would have had problems collecting from many trading counterparties, if not the exact counterparties “hedging” its exposure to an AIG disaster,” writes Tavakoli.

In a separate article in the New York Times, Joe Nocera points out that Goldman has benefited from government assistance in numerous other ways too.

Nocera points out that the $10bn of TARP money enabled Goldman to commit more capital to trading and to increase its market share after Lehman went under. The US government’s guarantee of commercial paper loans enabled Goldman to borrow $28bn, which it could also put to work generating profits. The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility allowed the firm to buy up distressed securities and sell them profitably to TALF participants. And permitting Goldman to convert to a bank holding company provided psychological support at a crucial point in time.

In combination, Nocera argues that the measures prove that Goldman will never, ever be allowed to fail. The value of this is more than a 200 basis point reduction in funding costs.

In the circumstances, how can the impact of government intervention be isolated? It can’t, says Simon Maughan, a financial services analyst at MF Global.

“You’d have to guess what your capital level would be, what your liquidity level would be, what the cost of funds would be without government support, how much the market would be smaller by, how much business is related to government measures like quantitative easing.

“There are so many moving parts, it would be a nonsense,” Maughan argues.

The fact that institutional shareholders seem to think otherwise suggests they’ve been asleep for a dangerously long time.