What was going on when I was born?

Genius, it is said, is a rising market. And from 1977 to mid-1981, when property prices here quadrupled, Hong Kong was filled with brilliant financiers, developers and bankers. The kingpins were mostly local Chinese entrepreneurs, but the boom also attracted and was fueled by foreign investors and bankers. The upward spiral was fed by rumor and speculation. It was what one banker here called ''a classic bubble.''

International Andrei A. Gromyko warned Bonn that it would be caught in a sharpened nuclear confrontation if new American medium-range missiles were deployed in Western Europe. On the second day of a visit to West Germany, the Soviet Foreign Minister also said that Moscow was ready to negotiate a reduction of its shorter-range SS-21, SS-22 and SS-23 nuclear weapons systems targeted on Western Europe on the basis of ''mutuality'' with NATO. (Page A1, Columns 1-2.) The White House again repudiated as inadequate an informal agreement worked out by American and Soviet negotiators in Geneva last summer for limiting medium-range missiles in Europe. Officials underscored their opposition to any agreement that fell short of the American position, which calls for both sides to scrap all medium-range missiles. (A1:1.)

The number of sites suspected by Missouri officials of being contaminated with deadly dioxin has reached about 100, up from the 55 earlier suspected. State and Federal officials trying to cope with the environmental disaster still do not know its full dimensions. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency, using somewhat more narrow criteria than the state investigators, has listed 83 potential sites. Although some will be eliminated after testing, the environmental investigators say they fear that countless other sites remain to be detected or may never be found. Of approximately 55 pounds of dioxin hauled from a defunct chemical plant in southwest Missouri, about 43 pounds are unaccounted for, and the fear is that the compound may now be scattered across Missouri and possibly in neighboring Illinois as well.

The Bankers Trust Company, one of the nation's largest institutional investors, is planning a major overhaul of its money management functions, according to well-placed sources in the financial community. They said the changes - which appear to be aimed at heading off an exodus of senior portfolio managers to competing organizations - would be announced internally later this week, Thomas A. Parisi, who is charge of public relations for the company, confirmed that an announcement was likely but declined to provide any details. The key to the reorganization at Bankers Trust, according to several institutional brokers with close links to the bank, is a decision to create a separate investment management subsidiary, which would take over some functions of the bank's present trust and investment division. Compensation of the senior portfolio managers would then be tied much more closely to investment performance than is possible under Bankers Trust's existing salary structure.

Senior monetary officials from 10 major industrial nations agreed tonight to make available a $20 billion emergency fund to help deeply indebted countries, according to participants at their meeting. This Group of 10 will use the new fund to replenish the International Monetary Fund's own financial resources so it will have more money to meet the enormous demands for new loans expected from developing nations over the next few years. The new fund is to be established by tripling the Group of 10's current commitment to lend the I.M.F. an additional $7 billion whenever it runs short of money and by relaxing the rules under which this aid is provided, official sources said. Today's basic agreement is expected to be approved Tuesday by finance ministers of the 10 nations when they meet here to coordinate strategy toward the growing international debt crisis and to discuss prospects for the world economy, these sources say.

On the precise spot where he stood 20 years ago before the white columns of the state Capitol and promised the world ''segregation forever,'' George Corley Wallace today became the first man inaugurated for a fourth term as Governor of Alabama. But this time, from a wheelchair, paralyzed and stumbling over his words, he recited a litany of economic woes burdening his constituents, called for unity and said, ''in times like these, we must turn to one another and not away from and against one another.'' This time, he was being inaugurated because he had received surprisingly strong support from black voters who apparently forgave him for past policies and earlier rhetoric. In his 1963 inauguration speech, he shouted into the cold January wind, ''Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in all of us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.''

With the reductions already approved and the bipartisan compromise just struck on Social Security revisions, President Reagan is preparing a 1984 budget likely to project a deficit in the range of $185 billion, Congressional and Administration sources said today. Late last year the President set a target of $155 billion for the 1984 deficit. But Administration officials said that projected deficits had climbed because of increasingly pessimistic economic assumptions forced on policy makers by the lengthening recession. Several Administration and Congressional sources said the Administration's estimate for the deficit on the basis of current services and programs, before any cuts, had risen from about $190 billion last fall to the range of $235 billion now.

Governor Cuomo warned today that he would have to cut ''good programs'' and ''raise some revenues'' to close a budget deficit next year that he called the largest in the state's history. During a day of meetings with key aides, Mr. Cuomo emerged to tell reporters ''we are considering everything,'' including layoffs of state employees. ''There is going to be a great deal of difficulty in meeting our constitutional obligations to balance the budget,'' he said. He did not say what taxes or other revenue measures he might propose. Meanwhile, a state publication said the Legislature would have to cut aid to local governments and increase taxes to close the budget gap.

Avis and Hertz, never shy about fighting in public, are at it again. At issue this time are free gifts, disputed market share figures, corporate raiding accusations and possibly stolen documents. The Hertz Corporation, the nation's leading car rental company, and Avis Inc., the longtime No.2, accuse each other of grandstanding. One executive of a third car rental company calls the clash ''idiotic.'' Others say the commotion may result in more cars rented.

DR. BURTON RICHTER is getting ready to battle a thousand of the best minds in the world of experimental science. Dr. Richter, a California physicist who often works in blue jeans and tennis shoes, won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for the discovery of one subatomic particle. Now he is in search of another. To find the new particle, and find it first, he is racing to build a $110 million atom smasher of radical design that may, with luck, perform a brilliant end run around a larger and more costly machine under construction in Europe. ''Richter is essentially taking on the cream of European physics,'' says Dr. Leon Lederman, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. ''If you have blood instinct, it's that whole mass of a thousand experimentalists you want to take on.''

The Chase Manhattan Corporation, citing problem loans overseas, including Latin America, said yesterday that its net operating income in the fourth quarter fell 29.9 percent, to $108 million, or $2.78 a share, from $154 million, or $4.40 a share, a year earlier. For the year, net operating income fell 25.2 percent, to $332 million, or $8.47 a share, from $444 million, or $12.53 a share, in 1981. Banking analysts noted a number of factors, however, that mitigated the apparent severity of the decline. ''The margin is temporarily reduced, due to very conservative treatment of certain interest income,'' noted Robert Albertson of Smith Barney. Furthermore, he added, Chase's earnings in the fourth quarter in 1981, like those for many major money-center banks, had been propelled to record levels because interest rates earned on banks' investments ''fell like a rocket.''

The White House said today that an informal agreement worked out by the American and Soviet negotiators in Geneva last summer on limiting medium-range missiles in Europe was inadequate and could not have served as the basis for an accord. In its first comments on the accounts of the private understandings worked out by Paul H. Nitze and Yuli A. @Kvitsinsky, the Administration underscored its opposition to any agreement that went beyond the official American proposal calling on both sides to scrap all their medium-range missiles, the so-called ''zero-zero solution,'' or option. According to reports in The New York Times on Sunday and today, which were not disputed by the Administration, Mr. Nitze and Mr. Kvitsinsky reached agreement on an outline for a possible accord by which the United States and the Soviet Union would set limits on their missile forces at radically reduced but equal levels. Instead of the more than 340 Soviet SS-20's, of which 250 are in Europe, there would be only between 50 and 100 left in Europe and a small number in Asia.