Tim Geithner Is Not Selling Out

Unemployed Treasury secretaries generally don't stay unemployed for long, but unlike some of his predecessors, newly private citizen Tim Geithner won't be going for the big bucks right away. Geithner announced today that his first job out of Washington will be at the Council on Foreign Relations as a distinguished fellow. It's a role he's held before and one with a high enough profile and fancy enough connections that he should continue to a play role in economic debates of the future.

Geithner also announced some news that will make economic wonks very happy. He's writing a book about the global financial crisis and the role he played shaping the response of the Federal Reserve and later the Treasury Department. It promises to be a very inside account of the very dramatic days of the 2008 crisis and the first term of the Obama administration, including insight on how some of the most important government decisions of the last decade came to pass. At the very least it spawned a Twitter hashtag to keep economic nerds busy for a couple of hours.

What Geithner won't be doing, though he easily could, is take a cushy corner-office job at a Wall Street bank or a board-member seat for some massive Fortune 500 company. That's the route a few of his predecessor have taken — and it can be very, very lucrative.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.