September 7, 1981

French bankers hastily began cutting lending rates this weekend after sharp criticism by the country's new Socialist Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and an unprecedented Government move to stimulate the economy by forcing down the cost of credit. At the suggestion of the president of Credit Lyonnais, Claude Pierre-Brossolette, France's three biggest state-owned banks, Credit Lyonnais, Banque Nationale de Paris and Societe Generale, which together hold 40 percent of all deposits, said they would lower their minimum lending rate eight-tenths of 1 percent, to 14 1/2 percent, effective tomorrow. Most other French banks promptly followed suit. The reduction is greater than the six-tenths-of-1 percent cut Mr.Delors had demanded and apparently reflected the bank president's desire to pacify an irate Finance Minister who only hours before warned that dismissals would result if French banks did not support the Socialist Government's effort to prop up the economy by lowering interest rates.

High interest rates seem to be bringing the housing market to a standstill, but a handful of large real estate service companies are thriving on the largess of corporations that transfer thousands of workers and pay all costs -including the financial gimmicks often needed to buy or sell a home today. ''Companies want help in transferring workers,'' said George H. Rathman, president of Merrill Lynch Relocation Services Inc. ''They realize they have to have the right people in the job no matter what, so we expect rapid growth to continue.'' Others estimate that the industry has grown at a compounded rate of about 30 percent over the past six years. ''Depending on what day you measure,'' Mr. Rathman said, the Merrill Lynch unit is the largest or the second-largest company in the field, collecting $197 million of fees from large corporations and moving 15,000 workers in 1980. High Interest Rates Help Record high mortgage rates and the leveling, or even decline, in housing prices have helped business, according to Mr. Rathman and executives at other concerns.

As President Reagan begins a week of difficult policy decisions, White House officials are acknowledging reluctantly that one price of Mr. Reagan's vacation in California has been a display of internal rivalry and discord in the Administration that had been kept suppressed. The officials said further that the vacation seemed to have strained relations and disrupted operations among Mr. Reagan's top advisers, Edwin Meese 3d, James A. Baker 3d and Michael K. Deaver, for the first time since the President took office. As a result, there have been an unusual number of contradictory statements from them and from Cabinet members on the budget and on military spending. Mr. Reagan's monthlong vacation was the first substantial period in which the twice-daily meetings of the three aides to smooth potential differences were interrupted. The recent disarray within the Administration was thus taken by White House aides as yet another illustration of the importance of the so-called ''big three'' in maintaining order in the Administration.

Declining in enrollment, financially troubled, transformed by ethnic shifts and, in some places, creeping once more toward segregation, many of the nation's public school systems are now struggling as they open for the new academic year. In Houston, students are already back in classes, although the extensive bilingual program ordered for them by a Federal district court is not. There are some 230,000 Spanish-speaking students in the Texas schools, and the state has appealed the court's order that they all be taught in both Spanish and English. In Boston, where students are to return Wednesday, 1,500 or more teachers and aides were laid off last month in the city's attempts to bring fiscal stability to a system that has been racked by many changes, over the last seven years. The teachers are to meet tomorrow afternoon to vote either to accept the cuts or to strike, which is against state law.

On the eve of Labor Day, Reagan Administration and union officials exchanged charges today over the Administration's handling of the air traffic controllers' strike and the effect of the President's economic program on workers. In a Labor Day message today, President Reagan asserted that the goal of his economic program was ''jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs,'' stressing an issue that may be more important to many union members than the controllers' strike. But Lane Kirkland, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., asserted that Mr. Reagan's ''hard-fisted'' tactics in dealing with the controllers had demonstrated an insensitivity to the needs of labor. ''What remains to be established is, where's the rest of him?'' Mr. Kirkland said, alluding to a line in the movie ''King's Row,'' in which Mr. Reagan played a man whose legs were amputated. ''Where's the heart? And where's the understanding of these people's problems that will make it possible to have a decent resolution'' of the strike?