March 20, 1986

The Export-Import Bank, a Government agency that provides credit for foreign buyers of American goods, today for the first time offered a loan to a buyer in the United States to meet what it said was heavily subsidized export financing from a foreign government. The financing will help a big electrical manufacturing company, the Allis-Chalmers Corporation of Milwaukee, in its effort to sell four hydraulic-turbine electric generators for use in western Pennsylvania. A competing offer has been made by a Brazilian company. The authority to offer credit to aid domestic purchasers was granted by Congress in 1978, but each use requires Treasury authorization.

Because of a transmission error, a dispatch on March 13 from Kawaihae, Hawaii, about a debate over growth in that state, misidentified Moanikeala Akaka. She is a woman.

Trading activity in the tax-exempt bond market ground to a virtual standstill yesterday as dealers and issuers reacted with alarm to a proposal in the Senate Finance Committee that would subject interest payments on all municipal bonds to the alternative minimum income tax. If the proposal - which would be phased in over a five-year period -becomes law, it could cost the nation's state and local governments billions in higher borrowing costs, industry officials said yesterday. ''At best, this would increase the cost of financing very significantly,'' said Felix G. Rohaytn, senior partner at Lazard Freres and chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation of New York. ''And even if this thing is taken off the table, the fact that it has raised the question of prospective taxation has left a residue of unease.''

''I wish I could say today that our action takes acid rain off our bilateral agenda.

The Koch administration said yesterday that it would break up what it described as a ''cluster'' of politically connected officials at the top of the agency that runs the Staten Island Ferry. The officials all come from the same two or three political clubhouses on Staten Island, senior administration officials said. Their reassignments are a ''precaution,'' they said, against the kind of corruption that has been revealed at the city's Parking Violations Bureau, where top officals came largely from the Queens Democratic organization while it was headed by Donald R. Manes. Both agencies are divisions of the Transportation Department.