There is "no evidence" the US housing market is bottoming out, Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, said on Tuesday, offering a sober view of US economic prospects.

His comments came in an appearance on CNBC in which Mr Paulson discussed with Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the idea of a conditional fiscal stimulus package that would be triggered if the economy continued to weaken.

Mr Paulson asked Mr Feldstein - who is calling for this approach - whether a triggering mechanism would provide a quick enough boost to the economy if it were needed.

Mr Feldstein said a conditional stimulus plan would "itself be a boost because people would have confidence that if the economy starts to slide there would be that fiscal package there to turn things around".

The Treasury secretary kept quiet on the administration's own thinking on a fiscal stimulus, saying only that "we are thinking through options right now".

Mr Paulson's comments came as minutes from the Federal Reserve showed that the regional Fed banks had widely differing views on monetary policy at the time of the last discount rate ­discussion. Three of the regional Feds signalled their desire for aggressive easing by requesting a 50 basis point cut in the discount rate, while two - Dallas and Kansas City - asked for no discount rate cut at all.

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Charles Plosser, the hawkish president of the Philadelphia Fed, on Tuesday appeared to soften his position, acknowledging that if incoming data suggested that economic weakness was going to be "more prolonged than expected" this could require "further adjustments to policy" - code for further rate cuts.

But he warned: "I am concerned that developments on the inflation front will make the Fed's policy decisions more difficult in 2008."

Mr Paulson said the housing market decline "has ­further to run". With 1.8m mortgages due to reset over the next two years, he said the administration was thinking about trying to extend its plan to offer mass loan modifications from subprime borrowers - some of whom will have their rates frozen for five years under the existing plan - to regular prime borrowers as well.

"One thing we will consider ... is maybe expanding this beyond the subprime borrowers to other borrowers," Mr Paulson said.

The mortgage securitisation industry lobby group indicated that it could be open to expanding the standardised approach.