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The High Price of People

There is a bank in New York City at 72nd Street and Broadway where you are only allowed to deal with a human teller if you have $5,000 or more in your account. If you have less money than that, you have to conduct routine business with an electronic machine.Ever since I read about this new Citibank policy, I have been trying to figure out what it means.

Boston is littered with the bodies of those who once served at State Street Boston Corp. Ask them why they left and many point to the bank's chairman and president, William S. Edgerly. "Edgerly makes everybody nervous," says one. "He's close to a genius. But a perfectionist. Impossible to work with," says another.

Brazil and its bankers yesterday formally signed agreements that will pump $4.4 billion into the financially troubled country this year and permit Brazil to put off repaying $4 billion in debts that come due in 1983.Citibank and Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., in a joint announcement, said the debt agreements are conditioned on International Monetary Fund approval of an additional $4.88 billion in rescue funds.

Tennessee's largest bank holding company Tuesday reopened the failed United American Bank of Knoxville and immediately wrote off $52 million in credit losses.UAB-Knoxville, the flagship of World's Fair financier Jake Butcher's five banks, was declared insolvent Monday in the fourth-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

We are not the only ones facing economic hardship. The world economy is in serious trouble. The evidence is everywhere, in massive national debts, rising unemployment, declining trade volume and idle factories.Yet, some Americans retain a curious illusion that we can separate ourselves from the global economy. We hear a lot of talk these days in support of protectionist legislation and in opposition to providing additional resources to multilateral institutions such as the International.

A giant turkey flapped down the streets of Manhattan, businesses opened their doors to the needy and Army cooks set out a holiday dinner for servicemen in Grenada as families across the nation gathered to feast and count their blessings on Thanksgiving Day.More than 350 years after Pilgrims and Indians shared a meal in the wilds of the New World, churches, soup kitchens, food banks and charitable organizations dug into their pockets to feed the old and the poor.

Brazilian government officials said yesterday they have completed negotiations with the International Monetary Fund on a new loan package aimed at permitting the nation to keep up payments on its $90 billion in foreign debt, Brazil's Finance Minister said today."This completes the whole package of negotiations for Brazil," said Ernane Galveas, Brazil's finance minister, after a meeting with an international banking advisory committee.

Yugoslav government officials have signed a package of credit agreements with a group of international banks providing $600 million in new credits and the rescheduling of $1.2 billion in debt that was to have fallen due this year.The agreements, involving about 600 financial institutions, were signed Friday at the New York headquarters of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., which heads the creditor group.

What should you do if you're chairman of a bank involved in one of those hundred-bank multinational corporate workouts that threaten bankruptcy at every turn? First off, don't get involved. Turn the matter over to specialists on your staff. Stay informed, stay available - but stay aloof. "You need an appeal process within the bank."

The telephone call was from the vice president of a company that makes coal stoves for homes. He called, he said, because oil prices seemed to be falling, and he had a question: Would there be a market for him a year from now? In the aftermath of the last meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a meeting that Saudi oil minister sheik Yamani dubbed "a complete failure," some people are enthusiastically arguing that the collapse in oil prices.

Oil-rich Mexico's announcement last August that it could not pay back on time $14 billion of its debts set in motion a chain of events that kept bankers, borrowers and government officials on tenterhooks for months.By the time Mexico made its announcement about its debts (which total more than $80 billion), Poland already was in arrears--many of its industries paralyzed by labor strife.

One December day last year, officials of the Dreyfus Corp., a $10 billion Wall Street mutual fund, crossed the Hudson River to East Orange, N.J., and paid $2.7 million for tiny Lincoln State Bank.Federal law is supposed to separate the banking and securities businesses, but Dreyfus had a ready answer when the Federal Reserve Board objected to its move into banking.

It's a boy, Prince Charles and Princess Diana announced to the world last June.It should have been a girl, the nation's amateur psychics insisted in 1982 predictions released Tuesday from a bank vault in Lantana."No laughing, now," National Enquirer reporter George Hunter warned as predictions of a baby princess and others equally off- target were shared after nine months of safe-keeping at the Bank of Lantana.

The chairman of United States Steel Corp. opened a carefully orchestrated attack on imports yesterday by calling for quotas on foreign steel sales for five years to save the domestic industry from "trade abuses" that have allowed imports to capture 20 percent of the American market.David M. Roderick also announced that U.S. Steel, the nation's largest steel maker, has filed unfair trade complaints against Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

The Washington Post has received the following two communications concerning the IRIS series: International Research & Information Systems, Inc., a Fairfax, Va., company that presently provides word processing and marketing services, has used the acronym IRIS as a trademark for several years. This IRIS is not connected with the now bankrupt International Reporting and Information Systems (IRIS), which is the subject of this series.

Wholesale prices for raw materials rose throughout the world this spring in a reflection of the economic recovery that began in the United States, the International Monetary Fund reported Sunday.That was good news for poor countries, which depend on the raw materials they sell for much of their income, but it was bad news for consumers. The prices they pay can be expected to follow higher wholesale prices after a few months, the bank said.

A sharp decline in world oil prices will be a mixed blessing for the world's bankers who have extended hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to developing countries and troubled domestic industries.Bankers with loans to Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and Venezuela will shudder. Not only are those countries major debtors, but also they rely heavily on oil revenues to pay off their loans and underwrite the goods they import for their large populations.

Alice Halsall Whitton, 89, a former banker and retired investment representative with Johnston, Lemon & Co., an investment security concern, in Alexandria, died Nov. 4 at Goodwin House in Alexandria. She had cancer.Miss Whitton was a native and resident of Alexandria. She worked on Capitol Hill during World War I, then for the First National Bank of Alexandria where she was an assistant trust officer before leaving in 1942.

It's hard to stand up to the soaring walls and sweeping staircases of the National Gallery's East Building, but at 6 feet 7, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker did a pretty good job last night.Even bending neatly at the waist, the chairman towered over the guests at the reception for delegates and observers to the annual joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

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