If you want to encourage the kind of conspiracy theories that have prospered in the wake of last year’s financial crisis — those that describe a secret cabal of elites running the world — try doing the following:

1. Have a group of 30 high-powered economists, government officials and bankers meet under the auspices of an international group that shares ideas on how to run the global financial architecture.

2. Make sure the group’s name can be reduced to a “G” and a number. (In mimicking the G7 or the G20, this keeps outsiders guessing: Are these guys from the government, or the private sector? Is there a difference?)

3. Have your Board of Trustees led by an influential former Federal Reserve chairman who’s now working as a senior advisor to the president of the United States.

4. Name the former vice chairman of bailout behemoth AIG as the group’s Chairman and CEO. (Also, if you want to reach the Zionist conspiracy theorists, it helps that he and another prominent member of the Group have very close ties to Israel.)

5. Ensure that membership includes the likes of these: A former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard who also now works as a top presidential economic advisor; an outspoken liberal economist-cum New York Times columnist; Citigroup’s senior vice chairman; and top representatives of the world’s four most important central banks.

6. Hold two days of closed-door meetings at the New York Fed, scene of many a desperate deal to rescue the financial sector in 2008, conveniently located a few blocks from Goldman Sachs.

7. Do not publicize a list of attendees and leave everyone guessing about the agenda.

These were the circumstances surrounding Friday’s start to the 62nd plenary meetings of the Group of 30, whose formal name is “The Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs, Inc.”

Journalists were given a modicum of access: a preliminary sit-down inside the New York Fed’s fortress on Thursday afternoon with G30 Chairman Jacob Frenkel, the ex-AIG vice chairman and former governor of the Bank of Israel. Frenkel and two other G30 members — Stanley Fischer, a former IMF deputy managing director and the current governor of the Bank of Israel, and Arminio Fraga, ex-president of the Central Bank of Brazil and one-time managing director of Soros Fund Management — shared their thoughts on matters such as the disequilibrium in the global balance of payments, IMF reform, monetary stimulus exit strategies and central bank independence.

But that was it. All that’s known about the meeting itself is that attendance is expected from most of the remaining 27 members, a group that includes the following luminaries: Paul Volcker, the chairman of the G30’s Board of Trustees and currently head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; Lawrence Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times’ opinion page; Citigroup’s William Rhodes; European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet; Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa; San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen; and Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England.

This is far less sinister than a conspiracy theorist would have it. The G30, which was founded in 1978 with the worthy goal of encouraging brainstorming between leading financial and economic minds from both the private and public sectors, is essentially a powerless institution. Unlike the G20, it does not have the weight of official authority behind it. Its proposals can only have effect if governments choose to follow them.

In fact, the Group’s proposals — often on arcane matters such as IMF governance — are usually eminently sensible and broadly in the public interest. But in this climate, when the general public’s seething anger against central bankers and their Wall Street counterparts is manifesting in the backlash led by Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” groupies, a more open-door approach to the G30 meeting might have been more constructive.