Jonathan Weil: Obama is spoilt for choice - to destroy the economy

Opinion

Enough of this going-halfway stuff. It's time Barack Obama found someone capable of doing something bold to the US economy.

And I've got a list of candidates who could do it.

Larry Summers is leaving soon as director of the National Economic Council, and Obama's aides are leaking names of possible replacements.

Among the luminaries being floated in the press by "people familiar with Obama's thinking" are Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons and former Xerox chief executive Anne Mulcahy.

But why settle for someone who merely oversaw great corporate destructions, when he could recruit a real doer? Someone like:

1 Dick Fuld. Now here's somebody we could rely on to leave a big mark. Like the size of a meteor crater. I realise Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in history, and Fuld was its CEO.

This is what makes him useful. No matter what he says, people instinctively will think the opposite must be true. If Obama wants us to believe the economy is turning around, all he has to do is get Fuld to say "the best is behind us."

2 Jimmy Cayne. True, the former Bear Stearns boss managed to sell his firm to JPMorgan Chase in a government-brokered deal for US$10 a share.

That's a notch against him, compared with Fuld's pristine record. In tough times, though, Cayne could be counted on to project calm, provided he's far from the action, like, say, at a bridge tournament. He'd make a fine second choice.

3 Stan O'Neal. The former Merrill Lynch CEO, who got a US$161.5 million severance package, knows the warm feeling of stimulus and has ice in his veins. He played 20 rounds of golf on four different courses during the last several weeks of the third quarter of 2007, while Merrill lost US$8.4 billion on subprime mortgages. His handicap only got better.

4 Angelo Mozilo. Who better to get us out of the housing crisis than the man who did more than almost anyone else to get us in it? Sure, picking the former Countrywide Financial CEO might seem counter-intuitive, given how the SEC is suing him for fraud.

Yet even if he loses, it's only a civil case. He'll still have the most valuable qualification of all: Never convicted.

5 Hank Greenberg. This man has an eye for talent. The former CEO of American International Group, who resigned in 2005 and later paid US$15 million to make the SEC go away, hired Joe Cassano to run AIG's financial products division. Cassano is the guy widely credited with blowing up AIG.

Throw in Tony Hayward's name for kicks, too. Sure, he's British. But Obama wants diversity.

Whoever he selects, surely he can do better than Parsons or Mulcahy. They wouldn't know how to cause a major economic crisis if they watched others do it first, which they did. Talk about lame.

- BLOOMBERG