Last week my colleague Dennis reported that Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama's choice for Treasury Secretary, is a "boring guy" with a "boring role."

Obviously, this was a typo. Our apologies! That post title should have read "Cool Guy Tapped to Fulfill Super-Important Role." The spellchecker didn't catch it.

As everybody knows, Geithner got hands-on econopocalypse experience at the Treasury during the Asian financial crisis, which was just as bad as the mess we're in now (although theirs had cuter characters). And — I'm sure I don't need to tell you this — Geithner became president of the New York Fed at the tender age of 43. It goes without saying that the presidency of the New York Fed is the second-most important job in U.S. central banking, right after the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, and that the Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for our country's economic, financial and tax policies.

But perhaps you didn't realize that Timothy Geithner belongs to the Keanu Reeves school of economics…

Mr Geithner looks a lot younger than his 47 years (though not as young as he did before the [current American] crisis began). He skateboards and snowboards and exudes a sort of hipster-wonkiness, using "way" as a synonym for "very" as in "way consequential" and occasionally underlining his point with the word "fuck".

These skills will give Geithner a unique ability to communicate with the American people about the Treasury's $700 billion bailout package, which is now a mere drop in the $7.4 trillion of taxpayer money that's being thrown at troubled financial institutions.

"You're way fucked," Tim Geithner will be able to tell the American people, right before he escapes to an undisclosed location on his skateboard.