Bush to name new Treasury Secretary

US President George Bush is today expected to name CSX Corp chairman John Snow as his new Treasury Secretary, White House officials said.

Bush fired previous Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey last week as part of a shake-up designed to control political damage from the ailing economy.

Snow, 63, is chairman, president and chief executive of CSX, a freight and transport conglomerate based in Richmond, Virginia. The firm runs the largest rail freight network in the eastern United States.

He was also deputy undersecretary at the Transportation Department under President Gerald Ford.

Bush has said Snow is his choice, pending a final interview, the officials said. He intends to replace Lindsey with Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman at investment firm Goldman Sachs, they said.

The president hopes they will both be better than O’Neill and Lindsey at communicating the administration’s economic policies to both Congress and the public, officials said.

Snow’s first task would be to help build support for a major economic package Bush plans to introduce later this month or in early January.

The White House has been working for months on a new package centred on more tax cuts for lower and middle income individuals, playing down the administration’s earlier focus on business-side tax proposals to stimulate investment.

Other ideas on the table are designed to encourage individual investors in the volatile stock market.