WASHINGTON INSIGHT

FED UP: Thoughts about the money supply will be on President Clinton’s mind this week as he gets the chance to make the first Democratic appointment in 13 years to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. . . . The choices are important for the President, who has worried in recent months that the powerful and fiercely independent Fed, which controls the money supply and influences interest rates, was poised to raise short-term rates despite his promise that passage of his deficit-reduction plan would keep rates down. . . . Word is he has narrowed his list to fill a coming vacancy to four choices: Alice Rivlin, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Van Dorn Ooms, a former Capitol Hill economist now at a Washington think tank, Peter Kenen of Princeton University and George Perry, a leading economist at the Brookings Institution. . . . Rivlin’s inclusion on the list raises the most interesting question: Did her single-minded obsession with the deficit irritate too many traditional liberals in the Administration who want to spend money, and thus want her out of OMB? However, the others on the list would also be relatively independent. . . . Administration sources say any of the four would be an improvement over Wayne Angell, the Board of Governors member who departs in January when his term expires. They believe that Angell is too preoccupied with tracking commodity prices as key to the economy, an approach most economists consider too narrow a focus on which to base the country’s monetary policy.

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BETTER LUCK NEXT YEAR: The President complained to aide George Stephanopoulos a few days ago that the First Family had failed to save any money in 1993. Thinking that the President already had enough problems on his mind, Stephanopoulos tried to reassure him: “Mr. President, I don’t think you should worry about that,” he said. “I think your savings account will be your memoirs.” . . . And how much might such an endeavor bring? Aides loosely throw around the figure of $10 million--if Clinton plays his presidency right.

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OLD HAND: Before outgoing Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s name surfaced as the next U.S. ambassador to China, the strongest speculation tapped Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles W. Freeman Jr. for the job. . . . The ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War, Freeman, who is fluent in Chinese, was No. 2 in Beijing in the early 1980s and excelled as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. . . . He is also free of the problems of another potential candidate, Michel Oksenberg, a leading China scholar who is now the president of the East West Center in Honolulu and was President Jimmy Carter’s national security aide when the United States established diplomatic ties with Beijing. . . . But during the George Bush Administration, Oksenberg traveled to China with Richard Nixon and generally supported Bush’s China policy against attacks by Democrats in Congress.

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HELSINKI WATCH: You have to have something going for you to quit one senior post in the Administration and get a second one within the first year. In the case of Derek Shearer, the Santa Monica economist, it doesn’t hurt to be one of the President’s oldest friends. . . . Shearer, a professor at Occidental College and husband of former Santa Monica Mayor Ruth Goldway, is headed to Helsinki as U.S. ambassador to Finland, Administration officials say. He earlier served briefly as a senior official at the Commerce Department, and his brother-in-law, Harvard Strobe Talbott, is the State Department’s overseer of policy toward Russia and its neighbors.