GoldFinger is not always a cynic, but cynicism is hard to resist when your correspondent reads a report saying that US banks which spent more money on lobbying policymakers were more likely to get a government bailout.

Banks whose executives served on Federal Reserve boards were more likely to receive government bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, according to the study from Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, professors at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. (The report was carried by Reuters.)

Strikingly, banks with headquarters in the district of a US House of Representatives member who serves on a committee or subcommittee relating to TARP also received more funds, the report said.

It would, of course, be interesting to perform the same analysis of those UK banks which have received public funds. When Northern Rock, the mortgage lender, was bailed out by the UK government in 2007, some of us in the press noted that this institution was based in the northeast of the UK, a traditional strong electoral region for the ruling UK Labour party.

Banks with an executive who sat on the board of a Federal Reserve Bank were 31 per cent more likely to get bailouts through TARP's Capital Purchase Programme, the study showed.

Of course, the fact that politically-connected banks were more likely to get a chunk of taxpayers’ money does not, in itself, prove that the bailouts were wrong. However, information like this does rather show up the hypocrisy of those politicians who have condemned banker bonuses. It also casts the so-called "too big to fail" doctrine of bank rescues in a rather different light.

In the end, the best outcome for the banking industry over the long term is to free itself of political control and stand on its own feet.