April 9, 1992

With a little luck, a new offtrack betting branch will open this fall in mid-Manhattan. But before the first $2 bet is placed, the Offtrack Betting Corporation will have spent $739,000 in rent for a branch that took almost two years to open. Present and former officials of the agency clash over who is responsible for the delays in opening the branch at Seventh Avenue and 38th Street, on the site of the old Dubrow's cafeteria. But the officials, from two OTB administrations involved in the project, agree on one point: the abnormal costs will reduce the OTB's overall profits this year and the revenues it can give the city.

American semiconductor manufacturers, the bedrock of the nation's high-technology industry, have stopped the Japanese erosion of their competitiveness and might be poised to make a comeback after a decade of decline, according to a growing number of industry executives and analysts. The new assessment represents a sharp contrast from the prevailing view five or six years ago, when many executives and analysts were saying that the American producers of silicon chips were in danger of being driven to extinction by the Japanese.

With some Democrats in open rebellion against their own leaders, a deeply divided House subcommittee approved a bill today that would give control over cable television prices back to local governments. But if anything, the ultimate prospects for a tough bill remained in doubt, as a majority of Democrats and Republicans on the panel made it clear that they favored a weaker measure and lawmakers from both parties predicted a long, tough fight ahead. Congress is struggling to pass a bill that pleases consumers while somehow keeping industry interests at bay.

The rapid fall in Japanese stock prices has stirred worries of global financial problems and shaken the complacency that world markets could remain unaffected. The apparent loss of market confidence in Japanese banks, whose share prices have suffered much more than other stocks, has increased the fears of investors about the global ramifications of deflating Japan's "bubble economy." That is the term the Bank of Japan has used to describe an economy where prices of many assets including stocks and real estate rose to unreasonably high levels.

With Congress and the White House dueling for the political high ground in the battle over the perquisites of high office, a Government report disclosed today that Vice President Dan Quayle used military planes several times in the last two years to take trips with Samuel K. Skinner, mostly to play golf. Four of the trips with Mr. Skinner, who was then Transportation Secretary and is now the White House chief of staff, were listed in the report prepared by the Government Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress. The fifth created a political uproar when it was disclosed last May as the White House was struggling to answer questions about personal and political trips on military planes by John H. Sununu, Mr. Skinner's predecessor as chief of staff.