Transparency and the economic emergency

An open letter to Congress, the American people, and the Office of Financial Stability:

The numbers are dizzying, the trailing zeros too many to even type...so how are we to understand what the US government is doing to avert economic collapse?

One way, we believe, is to shine a little light on who's in charge of the US Treasury Department's Office of Financial Stability, the new agency tasked with managing and distributing the initial $700 billion. Initial, that is, because much has already been spent and because all agree that it will be a heap of a lot more dough before we're done.

Transparency is a popular word but, unfortunately, a less popular practice. However, in times like these, being able to truly see what's going on may be the only express route to regaining the trust necessary to rebuild the economy. Thus, we offer our solution to removing the wrappers that typically shroud most financial dealings.

Why is transparency so important? As I've said so often about collaboration here on this blog (and in our books), "purpose is the glue and trust is the grease." Applied to the financial crisis, we write on our NetAge website.

Using OrgScope and some good online searching, we've done a rough mapping of the Office of Financial Stability (OFS), the people occupying its various new positions, placing it in the context of the larger federal government, and providing a dynamic map that you can fly around to see who's who and what's what. In the picture below, the red disks illustrate the relative size of the contract values that each of the OFS "policy teams" has to manage. The initial structure that we depict comes from the October 13 press briefing by Neel Kashkari, the new head of OFS.  According to the briefing, Pete McCarthy, who also serves as Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Management and Chief Financial Officer, is leading the design team for the new office.

As more info becomes available, we'll update the map. Please pass this post along to anyone you know who is interested in rebuilding faith in our economy.