Bonuses these days are paid in shares as well as cash; the equity element is often locked in for years.
After all, most debt has what might be called an equity element embedded in it.Consider the story of venture capital in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.
Fidelity, the biggest manager of Isas and Peps, says it is "disappointed" to see such a small increase in the limit on equity Isas, adding: "Giving a significantly larger increase to the cash, rather than the equity, element of the Isa sends the wrong message to the market at a time when the government claims to be trying to encourage long-term saving".
Furthermore, she argued the West needs to support developing countries with billions of dollars for climate adaptation and mitigation because of a "justice and equity element," not simply out of charity, an attitude that has been in evidence in the past.
But it has this other element that is different: a social equity component.
However, this proved not to be possible, as it was necessary to get an appreciation of the entire programme and identify both mainstreamed "equity-related" elements, as well as specific activities and outputs geared to address equity.
My strategy is to carry on repaying the mortgage first and then to save to repay the equity share element.
Pointon said it was not possible to see what the equity loan element of the scheme had done to the availability of mortgages, because when buyers borrowed 20% of the purchase price from the government, the mortgage was recorded as a 75% loan.
Treasury advice from 2013, when the Help to Buy policy was being formulated, predicted that the equity loan element of the scheme would have "a limited impact on housing supply since most of the sales are likely to be for homes which would have been built anyway".
The government's own figures show that despite the attention being given to Help to Buy in the housebuilding industry, its "equity loan" element, launched in April last year, has so far financed only 15,000 completed house purchases in England.
