But Lula's only immediate appointment was to put Antonio Palocci in charge of his transition team.
For investors edgy about Brazil's public debt, however, Mr Palocci is just what the doctor ordered.
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Mr Palocci is big, amiable, whiskered, and like Lula speaks with a disarming lisp.
Just a day later Mr Palocci, the embattled chief of staff of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, had resigned.
My guess is that this will be the last time Palocci is in a top position within the Party.
FORBES: Brazil's Embattled Chief of Staff Resigns; Women Run Pres Palace
It was the second time Mr Palocci has left government under a cloud.
Lula says that Mr Palocci and Ms Rousseff differ only over timing.
Things are going so well that Antonio Palocci, the finance minister, recently resurrected the unpopular idea of giving the central bank formal independence.
And the message of fiscal restraint will be reinforced if Mr Palocci gets a top job in the presidential palace, as seems likely.
As mayor of Ribeirao Preto, a city of 500, 000 in Sao Paulo state, Mr Palocci privatised some municipal services and brought businessmen into his administration.
That went against Ms Rousseff's express wishes, and was a defiant challenge to Mr Palocci, who had threatened the party with ministerial sackings should its deputies rebel.
The top tip for the finance ministry is Antonio Palocci, the youngish former mayor of a city in Sao Paulo's farm belt, who now heads the transition team.
With Mr Palocci at his elbow, Lula might have scaled back the ruinously expensive pension system, brought sanity to labour-market regulation and simplified a fiendishly complex tax code.
They will also pay close attention to Antonio Palocci, who oversaw Lula's embrace of market-friendly policies as his first finance minister and is part of Ms Rousseff's transition team.
He confirmed, almost as an afterthought, his top economic appointment: Antonio Palocci, a former mayor and a physician, who has a conciliatory manner and a commitment to fiscal responsibility.
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He was never charged with any crimes, but stepped down as polls were showing that the dark cloud surround Palocci politics was bringing down uber-popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
FORBES: Brazil's Embattled Chief of Staff Resigns; Women Run Pres Palace
Palocci said in a note to the president that he was stepping down in order to protect Rousseff from governing, as the presidential palace becomes forced to focus on scandal and political infighting.
FORBES: Brazil's Embattled Chief of Staff Resigns; Women Run Pres Palace
His career looked over when scandal forced him to step down in 2006 but worse scandals thinned the leading ranks of the PT to such an extent that Mr Palocci managed to make himself indispensable again.
In the early 1990s, when privatisation was still heresy in Brazil, Mr Palocci, then mayor of Ribeirao Preto, a city in Sao Paulo's farmbelt, sold the municipal telephone company and called on private investors to build a water-treatment system.
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The following day evangelical and Catholic politicians obliged the government to scrap plans to show videos with an anti-homophobic theme to school pupils, threatening that they would otherwise back calls for a congressional inquiry into Mr Palocci's sudden accession of wealth.
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