Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will consult for the hedge fund Citadel, the New York Times reported Thursday morning.
The 61-year-old former economics professor will be paid by the hedge fund to offer economic analysis and to meet with investors. He will not lobby the federal government on its behalf, he said.
Bernanke told the Times that he turned down job offers from several banks, choosing instead to go to a firm that is not regulated by the Fed in order to avoid a conflict of interest.
“I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills and knowledge,” he said.
Citadel has over $25 billion in assets under management, according to its website. Its head, Ken Griffin, has supported Republican candidates such as Mitt Romney and Bruce Rauner, the current governor of Illinois.
Bernanke joins many other former financial regulators in moving into the finance industry after his time in office. Most notably, Timothy Geithner, who served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Treasury secretary during the financial crisis alongside Bernanke, landed at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Last month, former Fed Governor Jeremy Stein joined the hedge fund BlueMountain Capital Management.
Bernanke left his position as the top central banker in the world last January. For the past year, he has given paid speeches, including to financial firms, and been a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
More recently, he has begun blogging for Brookings in relatively high volume on economic topics.
The former Princeton professor is working on a memoir of his time at the central bank, due out this fall.
