In the thick of the financial crisis, it seemed the bloated bonuses granted to corporate executives would be the death of us all. Following the G-20 conference in April, countries like France and Germany revved up their efforts to curb excessive bonuses. But the U.S. and Great Britain have lagged in taking such measures, and as the recession eases up, policy makers are less enthusiastic about adopting official bonus caps. Tomorrow the G-20 finance ministers will convene in London to discuss bonus regulation. Is this pointless?

The motions taken to regulate bonuses at the G-20's April meeting resulted in some vague goal-setting at best, but nothing concrete. France's Nicolas Sarkozy has made the boldest moves since the summit, convincing French banks to stretch two-thirds of their bonuses over three years and give a third in shares. Sarkozy has also proposed that that the G-20 stop cooperating with institutions that refuse to consider bonus caps. Germany's Angela Merkel has fallen in step with Sarkozy along with a handful of smaller European nations.

But some moderate regulatory efforts from a small group of European countries is not going to bring the G-20 closer to creating global pay laws, especially when capitalism's two Western giants are doing nothing. Gordon Brown has reverted to saying that bonus regulation will be too difficult to enforce without really explaining why. And Wall Street's not going to start changing its ways, so why create a fuss and pay the cost of staging a G-20 conference that probably won't make any progress?

The Atlantic's business blogger Daniel Indiviglio is among the biggest G-20 cynics and recently called into question whether or not excessive bonuses have even been real detriments to the economy. He's even more skeptical as to the G-20's ability to establish a global regulation guideline.

"So what does this mean for the G20?" he asks. "Probably that, at most, there will be some more fluffy language that they all agree to, like in April. They'll probably all concur that long-term profit should be the goal, not short-term gain. But exact ways to do so, like caps, won't enter the picture."