TheoWire

Taxpayers are taking another hit as strapped local governments fork over billions in fees on investments gone bad

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300million budget deficit—and few ways to make up the difference.

Insider-trading scandals have been a fact of market life since the Dutch were hawking East India Tea. And the high-stakes bust on Oct. 16 of Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Galleon Management, for allegedly trafficking in ill-gotten information includes the usual array of investment analysts, corporate executives, and clock-punching interlopers.

The leaders of 20 of the world's biggest economies committed to a laundry list of executive pay reforms for financial firms, including limiting bonuses to a portion of total net revenues and linking them tightly to share prices. But don't count on sweeping mandates from regulators just yet.

World leaders are talking bravely about fixing the global financial system. As the Group of Twenty heads toward an important summit in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24-25, they are vowing to bang out a regulatory structure that will keep rich, careless bankers from once again driving their firms to ruin and then getting bailed out by taxpayers. Finance ministers and central bankers who met in London earlier this month reported "substantial progress in delivering our ambitious plan."