On March, 5, 2002, Larry Lindsey and several other economic officials met with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office to discuss proposals that had been developed within the administration for corporate reform in the wake of the Enron scandal. Treasury official Peter Fisher, who attended the meeting, sent Secretary O'Neill a report later that day on their discussion. The President and vice president, Fisher wrote, feared that some of the proposals from the President's Working Group chaired by O'Neill went too far. They were particularly concerned with a recommendation they believed "would set too high a standard for CEO's and would lead to excessive litigation." Expressing skepticism, both men also "wondered whether the ideas reflected in the memo had been shared with 'real' CEOs." A few days later, the President's plan for corporate reform offered ten recommendations -- many of which were already being worked on by regulators -- only one of which required any legislation.

In the wake of the Enron collapse, President Bush unveiled his ten-point plan for corporate reform in March, 2002. The plan was based partly on the recommendations of the administration's Working Group on Financial Markets, which had been chaired by Secretary O'Neill and met in January and February of 2002. Behind the scenes, there had been considerable disagreements about how far-reaching the President's proposals should be. Even the President and vice president felt some of the recommendations went too far. The group's final consensus, captured in this June, 2002, memo to files, shows how stronger measures recommended by Treasury and other members of the working group, including Alan Greenspan, had been successfully resisted by other factions within the administration.

A few words from Alan Greenspan can plunge the markets into chaos or propel them to new highs. In public pronouncements, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is famously judicious. In private, however, Greenspan often takes contentious positions. In a memo written March 4, 2002, Greenspan mounts a scathing critique of corporate governance in America, using simple declarative sentences the public almost never hears from the chairman. "Absent a fundamental change in the perception of the duty to disclose, firms will continue to have incentives to continue to game the accounting system," he wrote. "Changes in critical areas of governance to align CEO interests more closely with those of shareholders in our judgment are essential and, indeed, overdue."

In February, 2002, Secretary O'Neill sent the president a memo recommending major changes to corporate governance in America. The memo represented the conclusions of the President's working group on corporate governance that had been chaired by O'Neill. Among many suggestions, the group called for firms to be required to disclose all relevant financial information, not just the minimum necessary under accounting rules. "Corporate leaders should disclose the kind of information that occupies their days, and that keep them up at night," O'Neill wrote. "There must be a proactive obligation to disclose information sufficient to enable investors to make informed investment decisions."