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More Ex-Im Bank Loans Pledged Against Imports

President Reagan told Congress yesterday that he will seek a $2.67 billion supplemental authorization in fiscal 1984 for direct loans by the Export-Import Bank "if necessary to meet subsidized foreign officially supported competition."This would be in addition to regular direct-loan authority of $3.8 billion--unchanged from fiscal 1983--and a boost from $8 billion to $10 billion in commitments to Ex-Im Bank guarantee and insurance programs.

Five prominent Americans received Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom Medals on Friday in Hyde Park, N.Y., on the 50th anniversary of FDR's first presidential inauguration.Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., received the Freedom of Worship Award; former Sen. Jacob Javits of New York received the Freedom from Fear medal; Robert McNamara, a former secretary of defense and one-time president of the World Bank

A stranger's face is an open book to Tran Quyen. He interprets past, present and future from the forehead and the temples (he found me patient and hardworking), the wrinkles around the nose (I must stop thinking about buying land for farming unless it is close to a large body of water), and the lines between the cheekbones and the chin (journalistic fame awaits me abroad in covering one event of importance.

Clive Sinclair, a slender, bespectacled 42-year-old Englishman with a shy smile and a newly fat bank account, sees big changes coming in the world, and offers a stunning forecast that, if true, will affect everything we do. "The 1990s will differ from the 1970s as profoundly as the 19th century from the 18th," he told a British television audience recently.With the advent of the silicon chip and the robot, he said, society is on the edge of economic transformations.

Don't let the mournful cries of the banks and the oil companies fool you: the collapse of the OPEC oil cartel, which promises lower prices not only for OPEC oil, but for domestic oil as well as other energy sources, is good news for America, and for depressed economies all over the world.Some banks, and some producing countries that unwisely bet oil prices would go up forever will be hurt, as they should be for making bad business decisions.

POOR COUNTRIES are delaying more than $40 billion worth of debts.The amount is four times the amount delayed in 1982, according to officials of the World Bank. The cost of delay is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. There are 22 countries that have started or completed reschedulings so far this year, including Mexico and Brazil, the world's biggest borrowers with debts of about $90 billion each.

Leaders of 24 countries from the Third World and the West who gathered here for two "minisummits" on peace, arms control and Third World development concluded their talks last night by calling for changes in the structure of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.The high-level roundtable discussions, hosted and organized by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on behalf of the 101-nation Nonaligned Movement.

This struggling city on the banks of the Passaic River, a 14-minute train ride and a world away from midtown Manhattan, has been for years a national symbol of urban decay."The worst city in America," out-of-town editorial writers labeled it after the 1967 riots, which claimed 26 lives, devastated the downtown business section and hastened flight to the suburbs.

Government officials and bankers from 10 industrialized nations met today and were expected to increase International Monetary Fund lending quotas to ease the debt crisis in the Third World. Representatives of the nations, known as The Group of Ten, met in closed session Sunday and yesterday to prepare for the formal conference of ministers and bank governors. The officials are expected to seek an agreement on how to get the world out of its worst recession since the 1930s.

The military losses suffered by forces loyal to Yasser Arafat are likely to trans-form the Palestine Liberation Organization from an independent political movement into an instrument of Syrian foreign policy that could change the political map of the Mideast in significant ways. The shift could dramatically affect, among other things, President Ronald Reagan's proposals for wider West Bank-Gaza peace negotiations, Syria's role in Lebanon.

Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan said yesterday that the United States will propose sharp reductions in the "access" of Third World nations to International Monetary Fund resources when IMF policy makers meet here Sunday in advance of the IMF-World Bank annual meeting.Once IMF quotas--deposits by members--are increased beginning in 1984, the United States will argue that no nation be entitled to borrow more than 102 percent of its quota in any year, with declining.

Early this month, at the two narrow bridges that link the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Jordan and the rest of the Arab world beyond, more than two dozen Palestinians traveling east were turned back by Jordanian authorities.The reasons were somewhat murky and the new restrictions on entry did not appear to be imposed uniformly. But fueled by reports in Al Quds, an East Jerusalem Arab newspaper with close ties to Jordanian officials in Amman, the word spread quickly in the West Bank.

A gradual decline in world oil prices should improve the debt situation of developing countries and help revive the world economy, the president of the World Bank said yesterday at Harvard University. "It's good news and it's bad news," A.W. Clausen said, noting that a price drop would hurt oil exporters and benefit oil importers.

THE WEST'S BANKERS and politicians are misleading the public with their assurances that the huge load of short-term international debt constitutes a manageable problem. The fact is that much of the interest on these loans cannot be paid, and most of the principle will not be.The situation is spinning out of control and poses a clear and present danger for the entire international financial system comparable to the one preceding 1929.

He was in his late 50s, his black curly hair streaked wih gray. His shoulders and arms bulged under his white T-shirt. His hands had the calloused, well-worn look of a laborer, his beltless pants the brand of K-mart.His feet were spread slightly apart. In his hands he clutched a torn sheet of paper, the kind children use, the kind with lines to direct a youngster's writing. He was flustered.

The king of Nepal said yesterday he hopes the United States will help speed up the development of his country's vital water resources, stalled for years because of the inability of neighboring India and Bangladesh to agree on a common program.The tiny Himalayan kingdom has the potential to develop as much hydroelectric power as Canada and the United States combined, but "at the moment it is being wasted," King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev told a meeting.

An extraordinary burst of diplomatic contacts among the governments of major oil-exporting countries seems to have lessened the chance that oil prices will crash -- and that some American banks could go down with them.Oil ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, plus high-ranking officials of Mexico, Canada and other non-OPEC oil sellers, have dashed between world oil capitals this week in a fashion that suggests a climax is nearing in OPEC's.

Office World Ltd. and six other firms with the same leadership at 3801 W Reno filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization Wednesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.In its filing Office World said it owed $151,041 to its 10 largest unsecured creditors, debt plus an unknown amount of debt to Commerce Bank.Office World's president is Carol Barr, who also is president of six other firms which filed bankruptcy Wednesday _ Boss Industries Inc.

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