May 23, 1991

Ask a White House official, a member of Congress or a Federal Reserve policy maker what might happen when the recession ends, and they give this answer: Growth will be slow and sluggish. The bursts of activity that came immediately after other post-World War II recessions will not materialize this time. That view showed up repeatedly in nearly a dozen recent interviews with Government officials. They accept the view of many economists that the American economy will probably expand by less than 3 percent in the first year of recovery, or roughly one-third the average growth rate after the eight previous postwar recessions.

A House panel dealt a significant political blow today to the Bush Administration's plan to overhaul the banking system. It unanimously rejected a proposal to restructure the industry's regulatory system. As a key element of its plan, the Treasury Department had proposed consolidating four Federal agencies into two -- a new entity within the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board that would streamline the system. That idea has drawn criticism from many of the regulators, including the Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, and L. William Seidman, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev pleaded today for $100 billion in economic aid from the democratic world, asserting that it would be well worth it to the West to bolster global security by priming a Soviet recovery. The Soviet leader put his own print on what has been an unofficial and far from successful Kremlin lobbying campaign of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies for a voice at their summit gathering and for considerable cash aid for the staggering Soviet economy.

THE French interior designer Andree Putman looked around for something new at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York this week and found what? "Nothing," she replied in her husky, accented English. "But I would never say that because it is quite mean and not quite true." Looking again, she saw a trend. It was on the precise spot in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where the Parisian design agency she founded, Ecart International, was showing at the fair, and where she herself was standing in black alligator pumps.

In the state's first package of broad new gun-control measures in almost a decade, legislative leaders have agreed to toughen penalties for illegal possession or sale of firearms and to crack down on loopholes in New York City's gun laws, officials here said today. Many of the measures were among those strongly backed by Mayor David N. Dinkins at a hearing earlier this year. The number of homicides in New York City last year jumped by 17 percent to 2,245, an all-time high, and the police said gunfire from unlicensed firearms was the cause in almost three-quarters of the deaths.