Vox – After cooling his feet for a number of months at the Brookings Institution, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke is going to cash in by working at the hedge fund Citadel. But rest assured, he told the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Alexandra Stevenson, Citadel isn’t regulated by the Fed — though Federal Reserve policy decisions certainly impact their business — and he “won’t be doing lobbying of any sort.”
In a world where lobbying functions as a sort of dirty word, that’s meant to make you feel better about the situation. But it shouldn’t. The truth of the matter is that lobbying and related advocacy work are more straightforward, and even honorable, ways to cash in than what Bernanke is doing.
