Web Seminars

Check out this post on the financial blog Naked Capitalism describing an off-the-record meeting the Treasury Department arranged between senior officials and financial bloggers. The Treasury has, along with other heavily scrutinized agencies within the Obama administration, gotten into the habit of trying to make nice with journalists by inviting small groups for a chat on the condition that they do not quote individual officials. Other financial regulatory agencies have held meetings that are so far off the record they aren’t even allowed to be mentioned. The benefit of these events remains unclear. Naked Capitalism blogger Yves Smith makes a point about their futility:

“My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty [much] all the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient.”