O'Neil suffers from his disconnect with administration. (Commentary).

THERE may be people on this planet who aren't furious with Paul O'Neill but if so they're keeping quiet about it.

The corporate executive class is steamcd about O'Neill's enthusiasm for jail time for their brethren who fiddle with the books. Wall Street people dislike O'Neill for his rude remarks about Wall Street people. Democrats scorn O'Neill because he serves a Republican president, and Republicans scorn him because he doesn't do it dishonestly enough. ("Show business" is how O'Neill described House Republican economic policy making.)

American journalists--who you might think would appreciate a public figure who speaks his mind--routinely describe O'Neill as an embarrassment to his office. In a rare display of solidarity, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have called for his head. Over and over and over again.

And yet however much O'Neill is loathed here, he is still more popular at home than abroad. On a trip to Brazil, people gathered around his limousine and beat it with sticks, perhaps in part angered by his suggestion that international aid to Brazil might wind up in "Swiss bank accounts."

When he flew to Argentina, even bigger crowds swelled outside his hotel and threatened to riot--presumably because O'Neill was the leading voice against extending International Monetary Fund credit to the country without government steps to rein in spending.

Keeping in practice

The only person who doesn't seem to mind O'Neill's behavior is his boss, though there are many understandable rumors that Bush is just waiting until the November election to fire him.

If his problem was incompetence, or if what he said was simply untrue, O'Neill wouldn't be all that interesting. But for the most part, the stuff O'Neill has said that has gotten him into trouble is not only true, but intentional. If the man is able to put his foot in his mouth every day, it's only because he is stretching every night to keep limber.

When he tells journalists that Brazilian politicians are corrupt, or that the U.S. doesn't have a strong dollar policy he does so because a) it is true and b) he sees no good purpose in people believing otherwise. The world would be a little better off without the conceit that the U.S. government directly manipulates the value of the dollar, or that Brazilian politicians aren't skimming off the top.

A huge part of O'Neill's problem is that he happens to have been Treasury secretary during a stock market bust and economic recession. If he were running his mouth in a bull market, he'd be widely admired, perhaps even given credit for the thing.

But in a bear market there are two arguments to make against O'Neill's loose lips.

The first is that investors respond not to reality, but to perceptions. If a credible authority tells them an encouraging lie, they might behave better than if they are told the truth. And so it's useful to lie to them, or at any rate not to tell them the whole truth. This may be true; but if it is what does it say about you?

Out of step

The second and more serious argument against O'Neill's approach to economic policy is that he doesn't speak for his boss.

He has routinely disparaged IMF bailouts--Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil--only to later come around and endorse them. It's not so bad to question whether money given by the IMF to Brazil might end up in Swiss bank accounts if you have the power to prevent the IMP from giving funds to Brazil. If you weren't going to give money to Brazil, investors were going to head for the exits in any case, so they might as well leave sooner rather than later. But if you don't have the power to prevent an IMF bailout, and you disparage the country that you wind up bailing out, you're screwed. You create an investment climate that only increases the cost of the bailout--and the sums of money piling up in Swiss bank accounts.

This disjuncture between O'Neill's convictions and the Bush administration's actions is O'Neill's biggest problem. His words are designed for one set of policies (the anti-bailout policy the Bush administration claims to favor) but winds up being attached to another set of policies (gaudy bailouts).

This problem won't be solved by replacing O'Neill. If the administration believes one thing and does another, whoever succeeds O'Neill in the role of spokesman is certain to fail in exactly the same way.

The funny thing--in my mind, the loveable thing--about O'Neill is that he simply cannot help himself. Every time he sets out to behave he somehow screws it up. Just last month, for instance, he told reporters he was finished making headlines. "I have been burned so much by trying to give people an education," he said on a visit to Seattle. "I've just given up hope that I can do it."

He said that from here on out he would "play the game." But people who actually play the game don't tell reporters they are playing a game. "Playing the game" obviously means "lying," or at any rate withholding the truth. How well can you tell a lie if you warn people in advance of it?

Michael Lewis, whose books include "Next: The Future Just Happened" and "Liar's Poker," is a columnist for Bloomberg News.