by Caitlin Kenney

Listener Thomas Youngs steered us to this Washington Post article about former bailout boss Neel Kashkari. It caught Youngs' eye because he remembered our interview with Kashkari's old classmate last October.

It's a great read about Kashkari's attempt to recover from his time as head of the federal bailout, a position he resigned last May. Here's a taste of Kashkari talking about step one of his "detox," building a shed:

"Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air," Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. "It was a political calculus. I said, 'We don't know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?' 'No way,' Hank shook his head. I said, 'Okay, what about 700 billion?' We didn't know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn't admit how scared we were, or how uncertain."

At the Home Depot checkout counter, Kashkari pays $157 for his lumber. He loads it onto his truck and drives into the Tahoe National Forest, climbing to 6,500 feet. The paved road turns to dirt at his cabin.

He rounds a corner and there stands the shed, in an old horse corral. He began designing it in his mind on Christmas Eve when incoming Treasury secretary Tim Geithner asked him to stay for the new administration. Kashkari didn't have anything to store in a shed but he knew, right then, that he needed to build it:

 

"I had to do something with my hands. It's a big amorphous unknown — what's going to happen to our economy. And the shed is solid, measurable. I can see it, I can touch it. It's going to be around for the next 30 years. It's the opposite of amorphous."

Shortly after we tweeted a link to the article, Twitter pal @justgregrit pointed out that Kahskari's got a new gig overseeing new investment initiatives for PIMCO.