O'Neill, 67, was little known in Washington when he was named treasury secretary, but he quickly gained notice for rattling financial markets with off-the-cuff remarks about the value of the dollar or the need for bailing out countries like Brazil.
He sent currency speculators into a frenzy earlier this year when he insisted to a German newspaper that "we are not pursuing, as it is often said, a policy of a strong dollar."
But O'Neill also had substantive disputes with other members of the administration -- and he was often on the losing side. Worried about the rising budget deficit, and dubious about short-term stimulus measures, he argued that the administration should adopt only narrowly defined tax cut measures aimed at particular sectors of weakness. But he was overruled by other White House advisers, and Bush has made it clear he will unveil a jobs package in January, if not sooner.
Lindsey, a former professor of economics and a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, was on the winning side of that argument. But he was seen as a weak spokesman for economic policy, and he created a stir by publicly predicting that the cost of a war with Iraq might reach US$200 billion -- a much higher estimate than others circulating at the time.
If Friedman is chosen for the National Economic Council, he would give the White House a person with extensive experience on Wall Street, something that few other top officials have. Because his post is not a Cabinet position, moreover, it would not require Senate confirmation or exhaustive scrutiny of his deal-making background.
Continuous blunders
That is an advantage, because White House officials are still stinging from the debacle surrounding the nomination of William Webster, the former FBI and CIA director, to head a new oversight board for the accounting industry. Webster resigned from the job after it became known he served on the board of a company that is being investigated for potential accounting irregularities.
Naming a new treasury secretary may be more complicated. People close to the White House said one strong candidate was Parsky, a former senior treasury official under Ford who ran Bush's presidential campaign in California and was on the president's Social Security commission last year.
Evans, who was a top executive at an oil exploration company and was a major fund-raiser for Bush's presidential campaign, was mentioned by several people as one of the most likely candidates. But Evans does not have much stature in domestic and international financial markets.
Archer is both well-known and experienced.
Other names have surfaced as possible candidates. One is Robert Zoellick, who is now the US trade representative. A protege of James B. Baker, the former treasury secretary and secretary of state in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, Zoellick has held senior posts in both departments and also in the White House.
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